Best of the Week: December 21 – 23, 2015

TODAY: In 1891, Henry Miller, king of banned books, is born. 

• “I love the lone human voice. It is my greatest love and passion.” Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich discusses and shares passages from her book “about the history of a utopia.” | Financial Times
• For those who would like to take a break from the holiday cheer: A literary guide to mortality. | Signature Reads
• “Now I’m starting to hate the word famous.” Eileen Myles discusses a poet’s relation to time, the fucked position of women-in-poetry lineage, and being in the guts of Transparent. | Interview Magazine
• Sentimentality vs. the “subtle, nuanced, cool, and true” novel: Graphing emotional potency by genre. | The New Republic
• In which Shelia Heti profiles Raffi, darkly interprets “Down By the Bay” with him, wonders, wonders what sex with him would be like. | Vulture
• “I would sit there for eight hours a day thinking of one line and it became delicious.” How Robin Coste Lewis overcame brain damage and became a National Book Award-winning poet. | The Guardian
• Taking “aim at structural racism and the tyrannical mediocrity of white male writers to great effect:” The best literary criticism of 2015. | Flavorwire
• “The point of a party is to make us forget we are solitary, wretched and betrothed to death,” and other entertaining tips from Michel Houellebecq. | The Believer
• A spectrum of writers ranging from Lena Dunham to Elena Ferrante select their favorite poems. | The New York Times
• “We’re taking the data we have, and we’re creating physical places with it,” is the most Amazon way possible to describe building a bookstore. | The New Yorker
• A spooky Christmas (this is absolutely a genre) short story by Alice Sola Kim. | Lenny Letter
• How Eula Biss, Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, and other writers give shape to their essays. | Ploughshares

And on Literary Hub:

• Dubravka Ugrešić on refugees, dislocation, and the moral crisis of our time.
• Instead of Christmas, suggests Sasha Sagan, we should celebrate the return of the light, i.e. today, the solstice.
• Christopher Hitchens on the importance of being George Orwell.
• Cristin O’Keefe-Aptowicz on the deep obsessions of non-fiction writers.
• On the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s Emma, a look at the rise of the “rich bitch” heroine.
• Counting down the 50 biggest literary stories of the year: so far, 50 to 36 and 35 – 26.

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