Best of the Week: July 18 – 22, 2016

TODAY: In 1888, a hardboiled Raymond Thornton Chandler is born. 

• “I am a non-believer, begging to believe in heaven, if heaven means I can hear this voice again.” Max Porter on the death of his father. | BuzzFeed Books
• “Major presses are inadvertently helping foster an environment where American indie presses can thrive by doing the very thing they’re best at: being small and, by extension, focusing on creativity and originality over sales.” On the importance of indie presses. | The Atlantic
• To work at the Strand, potential employees must complete a book quiz (which, unfortunately, does not tell you which Harry Potter house you belong in). | The New York Times
• “Trump didn’t fit any model of human being I’d ever met. He was obsessed with publicity, and he didn’t care what you wrote.” Speaking with Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal. | The New Yorker
• “The interview is a silly form, I thought, until the interview I had recorded was gone.” In which Rebecca Schiff and Alejandro Zambra get kicked off a school bench and have an unrecorded conversation. | Electric Literature
• A roundtable on Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue, “one of the most exciting post-Revolution novels written in Egypt in the last few years.” | The New Inquiry
• “When you’re young, the most important thing is how a drink makes you feel; when you’re a little older, it’s about how it tastes.” Rumaan Alam drinks Tequila Fortaleza Añejo and tastes the past. | The Wall Street Journal
• “’Conservative’ is not the right term for [David Cameron and Boris Johnson] anymore: that word has at least an implication of care and the preservation of legacy. ‘Arsonist’ feels like the more accurate term.” Zadie Smith on the Brexit. | NYRB
• “When I hear the latest GOP platform language, I hear a death sentence.” Garrard Conley denounces the Republican National Committee’s suggested platform planks. | TIME
• “Not many facets of the Trump apparition have so far gone unexamined, but I can think of a significant loose end.” Martin Amis on Donald Trump’s (in)sanity. | Harper’s Magazine
• “You can’t always trust the henchmen. Matter of fact, rule of thumb, never trust the henchmen.” An excerpt from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s forthcoming novel. | Ploughshares
• “If you were in this club seeing the tears roll down our eyes, feeling the sweat on our bodies, pouring down our torsos to our pants, as we move to Afrobeat, Afropop, highlife and juju, you would realise that WE ARE CHILDREN OF OUR GODS.” An essay by Pwaangulongii Dauod. | Granta
• “This book constitutes my discovery of and inquiry into questions that I’d always had both as an African immigrant and an African American.” An interview with Yaa Gyasi. | ZYZZYVA
• “How’d you hear about her all the way in New York?” Former Southerner Wei Tchou visits Flannery O’Connor’s farm. | The Paris Review
• “Maybe I will find in yage what I was looking for in junk and weed and coke:” How William Burroughs’s drug experiments inspired research on Parkinson’s disease. | The Guardian

And on Literary Hub:

• Why do we write about orphans so much?
• Why Calvin and Hobbes is great literature: on the ontology of a stuffed tiger and finding the whole world in a comic.
• When an internet skeptic takes to Twitter: Sven Birkerts on contradiction and tweeting against the tide.
• Lindsay Hatton on death, beauty, and the haunting of an aquarium.
• On the journals of famous writers: Dustin Illingworth investigates our obsession with the daily notes of genius.
• Laura Tillman on how to tell a murderer’s story.
• The Grumpy Librarian: for fans of Canadian writers, and enemies of humor.
• On office life: Irina Reyn searches for meaning in the cubicles.
• What it’s like to write crime fiction in the era of Black Lives Matter: a roundtable on race, bias, and gun control in America.
• Reading and writing my way through the AIDS crisis: Matthew Cheney remembers the books that helped him survive.
• What if I’m actually a character in a Larry McMurtry novel? On the beautiful losers of Texas, and returning to where you came from.
• The great Margaret Atwood on Donald Trump, witches, and flying cats.
• Michelle Pretorius wrestles with her country’s past and uses the lies of fiction to get to the truth of apartheid.
• Jenny Diski’s Jisei: David Ulin on death poems and In Gratitude.
• Living with racial battle fatigue: why fighting microagressions can feel like treading water.
• Josip Novakovich on a life measured between glasses of wine.
• On Rosamond Carr and the orphans of the Rwandan genocide: Nora Anne Brown on following in Carr’s footsteps at Mugongo.

---