Best of the Week: December 7 – 11, 2015

The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day

TODAY: In 1821, Gustave Flaubert is born. 
  • “I’ve no stake in my being thought of as a writer.” Gordon Lish on the heroising of Raymond Carver, the production of New Fiction, and approaching the sublime. | The Guardian
  • Colm Tóibín on the “strange, bitter heart” and writing of Clarice Lispector. | NYRB
  • True to form, Garth Risk Hallberg’s Year in Reading is significantly longer than everyone else’s. | The Millions
  • On finding “a better guide to the subtleties of terrorism than proclamations of military experts or political academics” in the fiction of Don DeLillo. | Al Jazeera
  • A list of the 100 best British novels, which is topped once again (and perhaps undeservingly) by Middlemarch. | BBC, The New Republic
  • “Anorexia is an inveterate liar whose grand theme is your identity.” Against the false narratives of eating disorders.| Slate
  • “Here are a few sad melodies from the choir that I hear.” Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. | The Nobel Prize
  • Metaphor is even more pervasive than Orwell thought: On the experience-shaping potential of the omnipresent literary device. | JSTOR Daily
  • In a much nicer holiday tradition than threatening children with coal, Iceland’s jólabókaflóð (Christmas book flood) results in the production of most of the year’s books. | 2Seas Agency
  • The story behind Gabriel García Márquez’s discovery by Carmen Balcells and the instantaneous conception of One Hundred Years of Solitude. | Vanity Fair
  • Investigating the promising but prematurely ended career of Hughes Allison, America’s first black crime writer. | The New Republic
  • From the Salem Witch Trials to McCarthyism to the present: The Crucible could be a Trump allegory. | Signature Reads
  • The Top Books of 2015, as decided by Michiko Kakutani, Dwight Garner, and Janet Maslin. | The New York Times
  • “Many of our self-styled Christian leaders would do well to seek out ‘The Displaced Person.’” On the lingering relevance of Flannery O’Connor’s least-anthologized story. | The Paris Review
  • Literary Wonder Women and magical human beings: 18 of 2015’s biggest literary advocates. | Entropy

And on Literary Hub:

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