Best of the Week: December 7 – 11, 2015

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:

• Ivan Sršen on the beautiful darkness of Zagreb, and the noir writing it has inspired. | Literary Hub
• On the missing history of one of literature’s most famous murder victims: Algeria after Camus, and the writing of Kamel Daoud. | Literary Hub
• Bill McKibben tells you the 5 books to read if you care about the planet. | Literary Hub
• Siri Hustvedt on gendered literature and why crying is manly when Knausgaard does it. | Literary Hub
• In the latest Phone Call from Paul, Paul Holdengraber calls Corey Doctorow to discuss how privacy is a vanishing idea and what is going to happen to our brains in the future. | Literary Hub
• Matthew Neill Null on Mark Costello, the lost legend of Iowa City. | Literary Hub
• A brief, wondrous history of Arabic literature. | Literary Hub
• Notes from a Bookseller Under Pressure: on selling things that aren’t books in a bookstore. | Literary Hub
• All week we announced the longlists for the PEN Literary Awards: here are the longlists for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham and PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Awards, the PEN Open Book Award and Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the Translation Prize. | Literary Hub

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