Best of the Week: July 13 – 17, 2015

TODAY: In 1817, reader, Jane Austen dies.

• To celebrate the pub date of Go Set a Watchman, the Internet celebrated with 1,000 articles. Here is the first chapter, Harper Lee’s backstory, and an investigation into what Lee wanted for the book. | The Guardian, NPR, Bloomberg
• “Why do I write? The answer to that is unknowable. I probably do so because I was moved by things I read and felt an urge to imitate them.” A final interview, via e-mail, with James Salter. | BOMB Magazine
• On the spellbinding writing of Clarice Lispector, alluring enchantress and, now, glamorous ghost. | The New Yorker
• Inhabiting adultness as achieving wholeness: Vivian Gornick reviews Susan Neiman’s treatise on growing up. | Boston Review
• “I had physicality and chaos.” A profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates, filler of James Baldwin’s intellectual void. | New York Magazine
• Blubber is blubber: on Two Years Before the Mast, inspiration to Herman Melville and early American literary classic. | Smithsonian Magazine
• Alejandro Zambra on 1970s Chilean clowns, not becoming a soccer star, and the inevitable comparisons to Roberto Bolaño. | VICE
• Feeling nostalgic for the Atticus Finch of yore? As it turns out, he may have always been a racist. | The New Republic
• Today in archival literary drama: Charles Dickens’s annotated literary periodical, henceforth known as the Rosetta Stone of Victorian studies, has been discovered. | The Guardian
• Learning Toki Pona, the littlest (123 words) and most metaphorical language, designed for talking about cute and nice (“pona”) things. | The Atlantic
• Behold, the Summer Issue of Asymptote, including fiction from Ismail Kadare and Mario Levrero, interviews with Yuko Otomo and Valeria Luiselli, and more. | Asymptote Journal
• Imagining Leopold Bloom with an iPhone: the poetics of and metaphors for information overload. | Guernica
• “One is left with the sense of a wake of aliterary vultures hovering around a helpless stroke victim, counting the Amazon preorders by the millions.” Should Go Set a Watchman have ever seen the light of day? | Vulture
• Sexual sock darning, peripheral men, and relationships at the margins: discovering the writing of Barbara Pym. | The Los Angeles Review of Books
• How to critique members of an insular, miniscule lit scene: Irish authors and critics discuss writing and handling book reviews. | The Irish Times

 

And on Literary Hub:

• “In the Rio dusk, Puig set up for his visitor, for the umpteenth time, a small portable cinema, made of words and faint light.” Javier Montes on the top-secret cinema of Manuel Puig. | Literary Hub
• Saul Bellow’s editor Beena Kamlani on working with Bellow to finish his last novel, Ravelstein. | Literary Hub
• Richard Ford on why we like Chekhov and the perfect truths of the Russian master. | Literary Hub
• Ta-Nehisi Coates goes house to house in Chicago: an excerpt from his newly released, Toni Morrison-approved memoir, Between the World and Me.| Literary Hub
• Joshua Mohr on rehab, talking to an invisible dog, and surviving the first day of the rest of his life. | Literary Hub
• “Her publisher deemed the content too risqué and too explicit, even for relatively enlightened French readers.” The greatest feminist writer you’ve never heard of, Violette Leduc. | Literary Hub

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