Best of the Week: January 4 – 8, 2016

TODAY: In 1908, Simone de Beauvoir, photographed here by Henri Cartier-Bresson, is born. 

• A preview of 101 books and 8 poetry collections coming out in 2016. | Brooklyn Magazine, NPR
• Searching for Robert Walser’s hands, scouts for his body and conveyors of his words. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Monsters, quests, and brave new worlds: tracing the basic archetypes of all stories ever told. | The Atlantic
• If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to read more, here are some suggestions with which to start. | The Millions, Vulture, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Ploughshares
• “People think swimming is carefree and effortless. A bath! In fact, it is full of anxieties.” A short story by Anne Carson. | The New Yorker
• Eighteen copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio, which are usually kept in the real life equivalent of the laser vaults in spy movies, will tour the US. | NPR
• “Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism— [T.S.] Eliot is of this type.” Barack Obama, literary critic. | NYRB
• Esquire has remedied its 99 percent male “80 Books Every Man Should Read” by enlisting “female literary powerhouses” to create a more encompassing list. | Esquire
• Eileen Myles, Margo Jefferson, Colum McCann and 25 other authors share the books that changed their lives. | Vulture
• Go forth and reuse: The NYPL has digitized and uploaded more than more than 180,000 public domain items to their Digital Collections. | New York Public Library
• “They called me Heaven; and Hope, Hell.” A short story (not included in A Manual for Cleaning Women) by Lucia Berlin. | Electric Literature
• The Northshire Bookstore received an outpouring of support when it called out a customer who threatened the store for displaying copies of the Qur’an. | American Booksellers Association
• On the vampiric nature of the novel, a potent and intoxicating form of mind control. | Aeon
• Jia Tolentino asks that we stop sharing our plans to read diverse books and just read them. | Jezebel
• Michael Idov on quitting his job at the highly censored Russian iteration of GQ to write ambiguously audacious screenplays. | The New York Times

And on Literary Hub:

• A brief history of books that do not exist.
• Adam Gopnick on the editor of Charlie Hebdo’s posthumous manifesto and the fine art of blasphemy.
• The life and times of the great Rafael Chirbes.
• How one writer gave up on the great American novel and got a book deal.
• Charles Baxter remembers Larry Levis, and a night of true poetic genius.

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