Best of the Week: February 8 – 12, 2016

TODAY: In 1976, Mario Vargas Llosa punches Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the face. 

• The black southern signifiers and simulacra are unrelenting here: On Beyoncé’s “Formation” music video, “a black feminist, black queer, and black queer feminist theory of community organizing and resistance.” | New South Negress
• A profile of pioneering cartoonist Daniel Clowes, who is much more famous than the world’s most famous badminton player. | The California Sunday Magazine
• “As I write this, I’m experiencing the sinking feeling that I will hate the Writers’ Conference.” Richard Grayson’s diary entries from the 1977 Bread Loaf Conference. | Thought Catalog
• “She was a beautiful free woman in her life for the length of that walk toward me which is what made it all worthwhile.” Eileen Myles recalls a past love. | The Cut
• “I find conventional novels brutally boring.” An interview with Álvaro Enrique, author of Sudden Death. | VICE
• From Homer’s Odysseus to Murakami’s Noboru Wataya (the cat), Idra Novey presents a brief history of literary vanishings. | Electric Literature
• “I was a world removed from the beautiful, spangled, over-rewarded life I’d been mired in, and almost immediately, to my utter astonishment, I started to get productive writing done.” John Wray recalls moving to New York. | BuzzFeed Books
• Italy’s leading TV production company has announced they are making a series out of the Neapolitan novels, so sign up for your Italian classes now. | Hollywood Reporter
• “By translating something you’re implicitly recommending it.” An interview with the translator of Roberto Bolaño’s and Álvaro Enrigue’s, Natasha Wimmer. | Broadly
• Nothing is as vain and self-regarding as the law: Lorrie Moore on the “immersive and vérité” docuseries Making A Murderer. | NYRB
• “By shutting the door to the refugees, Europe is shutting the lid on its own satin-padded coffin.” Aleksandar Hemon on the cost of dehumanizing refugees. | Rolling Stone
• “All subjects come back, both to haunt and to goad you.” An interview with John Jeremiah Sullivan. | Chapter 16
• Garth Greenwell and Hanya Yanagihara discuss absences, recovering from poetry, and writing on trash. | Work in Progress
• Other books really nourish me: An interview with Brian Evenson. | Tin House
• Examining the book collections of Virginia Woolf (vast), Joseph Roth (paltry), and other writers. | The Millions

And on Literary Hub:

• Rebecca Solnit on mysterious pregnancies, disappearing men, and the baffling language of the CDC.
• Hannah Tennant-Moore on the best literary sex scenes.
• Race, money, and the neoliberal tech-bro: Gideon Lewis-Kraus in conversation with Tony Tulathimutte.
• Nandini Balial on finding herself in the work of Jhumpa Lahiri.
• In honor of Mardi Gras, a New Orleans reading list.
• Amy Gustine’s advice for writing what you don’t know.
• Francisco Goldman in conversation with Idra Novey about violence, humor, and North American naiveté.
• A Phone Call from Paul: Jhumpa Lahiri on family, banality, and the art of conversation.
• A. O. Scott asks himself: what is criticism?
• A bikini, a toothbrush, and 44 issues of The New Yorker: Summer Brennan attempts to catch up on a year’s reading.
• Stuart Evers tries to figure out what makes something funny, tells a couple jokes along the way.
• Han Kang on the difference between the Korean and American literary scenes, and being stuck with the image of a woman who turns into a plant.

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