Best of the Week: February 29 – March 4, 2016

TODAY: In 1839, Charlotte Brontë declines Reverend Henry Nussey’s marriage proposal, claiming that he would find her “romantic and eccentric” and not practical enough to be a clergyman’s wife. 

• James Brown, the history of genetics, and more: Six nonfiction books to look forward to this spring. | The Wall Street Journal
• Antidotes to loneliness from Jean Rhys, Samuel Beckett, Chris Kraus, and others. | Publishers Weekly
• “Its loss would represent an unimaginable blow to future generations of historians.” A report from the protests to save London’s Feminist Library. | Broadly
• Many of the 2016 PEN Award winners were announced, and Toni Morrison will receive the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. The recipients of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, including Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Tessa Hadley, and Hilton Als, were also announced. | PEN America, Windham Campbell Prizes
• “He had been the high priest in charge of my prayer of being a black person who wanted to exist on books and words alone.” Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah on visiting James Baldwin’s house. | BuzzFeed Books
• Looking for Kafkas past (in biological snapshots) and present (in Lagos). | Flavorwire
• Ten must-read, five of the best, and the six best history books coming out in March. | Flavorwire, The Amazon Book Review, Barnes & Noble Reads
• “Though known as the ‘graveyard of empires,’ lab mouse for various regimes, safe haven for terrorist groups and opium, Afghanistan is also the land of poetry, story-telling, fables, folktales, and proverbs.” Fazilhaq Hashimi on writing in Afghanistan. | Electric Literature
• CNET will begin publishing “great short stories, with a tech twist” monthly; the first is by Michelle Richmond, who will be followed by Anthony Marra, Cristina García. and Nayomi Munaweera. | Technically Literate
• This Bridge Called My Back, Gender Trouble, and beyond: 33 feminist works of criticism, fiction, and memoir, in honor of International Women’s Day. | Verso
• It was like a dictation from a ghost: Alexander Chee on the Siren call of writing, George Sandism, and fiction’s manifestations in reality. | Asian American Writers’ Workshop
• “What was I going to say? That this or that writer was not Virginia Woolf but was similarly female?” Rivka Galchen on women writers and gender envy. | The New Yorker
• Choice didn’t enter at this point: Garth Greenwell on writing a 41-page paragraph and block paragraph novels. | Catapult
• “That’s kind of in a sense what the poem comes from, the idea of healing together and breathing together.” An interview with Richard Blanco, the poet who read at the re-opening of the U.S. Embassy in Cuba. | The Alignist
• “Before the selfie came ‘the self’” and other insights on Jane Eyre and the formation of individuality. | The Atlantic

And on Literary Hub:

• Umberto Eco on Donald Trump: fourteen ways of looking at a fascist.
• Was Montaigne actually a time traveler?
• Writer/superfan Alina Simone’s quest to discover why Madonna is hated in her hometown.
• As Apple goes to Washington, Andrew Keen wonders why we trust corporations more than governments.
• Wise men vs. old women: a brief history of gendered ageism and presidential candidacies.
• Poems, proofs, and mimeos: inside the unpublished world of Allen Ginsberg.
• The rise of the Cuban literati plus a reading list of contemporary Cuban lit.
• Kent Russell on the diminishing returns of freelance magazine writing.
• The toxic smog of the information age: “Scroogled,” a short story by Cory Doctorow.
• From inside the WI Innocence Project: a reading list on our broken criminal justice system.
• The wonderful, proto-feminist snark of Jane Austen’s juvenilia, plus an entire (short) novel by young Austen, “The beautifull Cassandra.”

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