Best of the Week: December 12 - 16, 2016

• Our book review aggregator has relaunched with a new design (and many other new features). | Book Marks
• “If he’d been a character in fiction, he’d have been unbelievable, less a convincing person than a constellation of symbols, a dream that a certain population of America had of itself.” Hanya Yanagihara, Marilynne Robinson, and other writers share thoughts on Obama’s legacy. | The Guardian
• “I still want Obama to be right. I still would like to fold myself into the dream. This will not be possible.” Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a history of Obama’s presidency. | The Atlantic
• I recognize that I am in very rare company, to say the least: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which he did not deliver in person (although Patti Smith performed on his behalf). | Nobelprize.org, YouTube
• “It occurred to me then that, although I did not live in the time of Arthur Rimbaud, I existed in the time of Bob Dylan.” Patti Smith on performing at this year’s Nobel Prize ceremony. | The New Yorker
• “My hope is that, in the spaces between all those layers, a conversation between women of different generations slowly emerges.” Valeria Luiselli translates (and annotates) her mother’s conversation with a female ex-combatant of the FARC. | Guernica
• Vivian Gornick on “the shock of the quotidian” and Marriage as a Fine Art by Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers. | The New Republic
• A new issue of Public Books, including pieces on Victor LaValle and police brutality, being Octavia Butler’s neighbor, and animal interiority, is now online. | Public Books
• Profiles of 10 poets who published debut collections in 2016, including Ocean Vuong, Tommy Pico, and Solmaz Sharif. | Poets & Writers
• Téa Obreht on David Attenborough’s nature documentaries, which “put humans right in their place: small enough to swim in a blue whale’s veins, and yet, by 1970, responsible for that species’ near-extinction.” | The New Yorker
• Prose is a public language and poetry is a private language: An interview with Mary Ruefle. | The Paris Review
• Announcing this year’s 35 Over 35—a collection of remarkable debuts by authors over the age of 35. | 35 Over 35
• The longlist for the 2017 Tournament of Books, from Leila Aboulela to Nell Zink, has been announced. | The Morning News
• “It is easy enough to list the small group of well-known, foundational authors; but we must also take note of those lesser known writers—most enslaved at one point; a few born free—whose names and works deserve to be commemorated.” On early African American writing. | Times Literary Supplement
• On Walter Benjamin’s afterlives and the “burgeoning ‘Benjamin Industry.’” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “The engine of his intelligence was turned painfully inwards. He had the brain that ate itself.” On David Foster Wallace and depression. | Hazlitt

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