Best of the Week: February 15 – 19, 2016

TODAY: In 2005, Hunter S. Thompson dies (but the crazy never die). 

• Yesterday, both Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman, and Italian author Umberto Eco died. | The New York Times, The Guardian
• “I asked them what it meant to stop progressives, and they had a hard time getting past a personal animus for Clinton and ‘her ugly pantsuits’ and ‘Benghazi’.” Christian Lorentzen reports from New Hampshire. | London Review of Books
• Colson Whitehead, Roxane Gay, and more: Books by black authors to look forward to in 2016. | The Root
• Wretched, wretched, and yet well intended: Kafka on the Metro and his writing desk, from the forthcoming Is That Kafka? 99 Finds. | The Nation
• “It’s not magic. You just keep your eyes open.” An interview with essay champion and writer John D’Agata. | Guernica
• “Publishing in Russia is the art of the possible. That is not the same thing as censorship. Or is it?” On the self-censoring Russian publishing industry. | The Intercept
• “I would venture to assume that all Muslim Americans felt the weight of this paradox in the years after September 11th, and never more so than when at the airport.” On hate crimes, racial awareness, and the post 9/11 world. | The Rumpus
• Far-seeing in matters of both business and taste: On the small but storied experimental publishing house New Directions. | The New Yorker
• A review of the articles in the new, semi-clothed Playboy, which includes a case study of modern sexuality by Bret Easton Ellis and a “a rambling slice of life” by Karl Ove Knausgaard. | Vanity Fair
• How can we be so cruel to such a fundamental part of writing? Isolating and honoring the punctuation of famous novels. | Medium
• “In the pressure cooker of his hellish life, Cervantes heated up his Quixote, which he then served to the hankering masses.” How Miguel de Cervantes reinvented fiction. | Flavorwire
• Yahdon Israel and Jess Row discuss arbitrary categories, writing into trouble, and Rachel Dolezal. | The New Inquiry
• On Raduan Nassar, a Brazilian recluse who hasn’t published a book in 30 years and is becoming a sensation in English translation. | The Independent
• “I didn’t expect to meet such powerful women in a place where everything I had heard about was men and the patriarchy.” On Nigeria’s self-published littattafan soyayya (books of love). | Wired
• Beyond Jane Eyre and Little Women: Eight classic female Bildungsroman, for your reading pleasure. | The Toast
• Studies show that our robot overlords will be kind to us if we teach them to read. | The Guardian

And on Literary Hub:

• Jo Nesbø built the perfect writing room (and still writes at the local cafe).
• Was Antonin Scalia the most literary of the Supreme Court justices?
• Kiese Laymon: What Bill Cosby taught me about sexual violence and flying.
• Charles Simic on Aleksandar Tišma and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia.
• Belinda McKeon on the night that Sylvia Plath met Ted Hughes, (at a literary launch party, 60 years ago this week).
• Lisa Levy on love, stalking, satire, and the crime fiction of Caroline Kepnes.
• Jhumpa Lahiri talks to Paul Holdengraber about language, nostalgia, and being the child of immigrants.
• Ten more writers nobody reads: bigger, more obscure, less read.
• The pretty, the dead, the unexpected: on the influential women of Oscar Wilde’s life.
• How to fictionalize the world’s greatest world record holder.
• On the anniversary of Hunter S. Thompson’s death, cataloging his life and crimes in the Big Apple.

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