Best of the Week: February 1 – 5, 2016

TODAY: In 1937, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is published. 

• “Could I offer the world something so useful and beautiful?” Sarah Manguso confronts her writerly envy. | The New York Times Sunday Book Review
• The first indies of 2016: 41 books put out by small presses last month. | Entropy
• In which Jenny Diski imagines writing a book of the words she has lost to aging and chemotherapy. | Berfrois
• Fiction has no half-life: Tom Bissell’s introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of Infinite Jest, in honor of its birthday yesterday. | The New York Times
• “It’s strange to keep confronting, in these stylistic ways, how you were constructed.” An interview with Margo Jefferson. | BOMB Magazine
• “The lens that we have is a way in which we can claim the entire world.” A profile of Chris Jackson, one of the publishing industry’s few black editors. | The New York Times Magazine
• Memoir “is not simply a form within the Black literary tradition; it has thoroughly shaped that tradition.” On the recent work of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Margo Jefferson, Clifford Thompson, and Rosemary Freeney Harding and Rachel Harding. | Public Books
• In the most convoluted retelling of David and Goliath yet, Amazon has decided to possibly, maybe open up to 400 brick-and-mortar bookstores. | The Wall Street Journal
• Capturing “what might have happened within what happened:” Alexander Chee on writing, and reading, historical fiction. | The New Republic
• The literature of the exhausted: How can writers be expected to innovate and take risks without financial stability? | Dissent Magazine
• You couldn’t invent something better than a book: On the “mystery mogul[s]” keeping St. Mark’s Bookshop alive. | The Awl
• The Whiting Foundation has announced a new grant, which will offer allocations of $35,000 to as many as three creative nonfiction works in progress. | The Whiting Foundation
• “Swimming in the ocean is writing a novel; swimming in a pond is writing in a diary.” Hanya Yanagihara on reenacting a version of ‘‘The Swimmer’’ by swimming across Martha’s Vineyard. | T Magazine
• “I just think goodness is more interesting.” Toni Morrison on internalized feelings, altruism, and the original title of her most recent book. | The Guardian
• “We might be under siege for years. So books are our greatest portal to knowledge.” On the 15,000-volume library salvaged from ruins in Damascus. | BuzzFeed News
• Every fake should tell a story: Dominic Smith on emailing “a master forger to authenticate a forgery of a fictitious painting by a fictional character.” | Work in Progress

And on Literary Hub:

• What it means to reveal emotional truth in a historical novel: on the stories we tell to make sense of the past.
• David Ulin on Sinclair Lewis, Donald Trump, and American know-nothing nativism.
• Matt Gallagher on why you don’t have to be a veteran to write about war.
• Aaron Bady recommends 25 new books by African writers you should be excited about.
• Bringing literature to the Dark Web: an interview with the founders of The Torist.
• How I accidentally wrote a Civil War novel.
• Cheryl Strayed on Alice Munro and self-discovery: Paul Holdengraber continues his phone call with the author of Wild.
• Suzanne Joinson on the creative necessity of traveling.
• What do you do when a self-declared genius demands you to read his masterpiece?
• Remembering the great Urdu writer Intizar Hussain: remembrances from Yiyun Li, Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie, and more, plus an excerpt from Hussain’s celebrated novel, Basti.
• Eddie Glaude Jr. on race in America, and why James Baldwin’s truth still holds today.

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