Best of the Week: January 19 – 22, 2016

TODAY: In 1930, poet, playwright, and Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott is born. 

• Lascivious nymphs, dull wifely women, and intellectual equals: Adelle Waldman on the novel’s evolving portrayal of marriage. | The New Yorker
• Clarice Lispector’s translator Katrina Dodson interviews Elena Ferrante’s translator/public face, Ann Goldstein. | Guernica
• The 30 finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced. | Omnivoracious
• Chelsea Hodson on vanity projects, the beauty of broken hearts, and molting like a tarantula. | Hobart
• Garth Greenwall on feeling excluded from desire, the meeting of the physical and metaphysical in sex, and writing on trash. | The Paris Review
• Pigs moving outside of space and time: Paul Lisicky on his favorite Flannery O’Connor passage. | The Atlantic
• Writing an eternal present day: On pop culture references in novels, from American Psycho to A Little Life. | Electric Literature
• “To find these people, to understand how they lived and how they died and how oppressed they were, the reality hits you.” Regina Mason on discovering her ancestor’s memoir about escaping slavery. | NPR
•  Specimens of tastelessness drawn from the blabbings of contemporaries: Janet Malcolm on Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. | NYRB
• A translated collection of Haida oral literature, which Margaret Atwood has described as “a work of music built from silent images,” will be published in the UK thanks to her endorsement. | The Guardian
• Against the “self-replicating machine of This Is What Important Literature Looks Like:” A list of women-run presses. | VIDA
• “How does it feel?” and other questions for Sunil Yapa from his former teacher Colum McCann. | The Barnes & Noble Review
• On Robert Pinsky’s videogame, the work of a poet having fun. | Mindwheel, The New Yorker
• Writing blindly, in bursts: Sybille Lacan recalls her father. | Asymptote Journal
• In which former The New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier supplies his cruel cackling as a quote, announces that he will launch a new journal with Steve Jobs’s widow. | New York Magazine

And on Literary Hub:

• Barry Gifford on one of the 20th century’s great unsung crime novels.
• Alabama, 1956: Gordon Parks tells the story of segregation, one photo at a time.
• Sergei Lebedev on why there is no place for joy in today’s Moscow, a city sealed in silence.
• A Phone Call from Paul, continued: William Gibson on technophobia and the power of film.
• A very odd night in a possibly fake North Korean village.
• Morgan Jerkins on cliché, stereotype, and the struggle to write blackness.
• Are the Kids all right? Larry Clark’s cautionary tale of teen nihilism, two decades on.

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