Best of the Week: July 20 – 24, 2015

TODAY: In 1897, Jack London sets sail to join the Klondike Gold Rush.

• Prominent literary figures reveal the classics they haven’t read (from Ulysses to The Hunger Games) and their reasoning (from weakness of will to resisting popular opinion). | Hazlitt
• Books capturing the spirit of California and New York, presented as minimalist still lifes. | T Magazine
• “It wasn’t just that the stories were gripping; they were also my inheritance, my fate.” Sandie Friedman recounts her obsession with Holocaust narratives. | The Rumpus
• Flee, Think, Feel: Jessa Crispin on the colonialist tendencies and regressive gender norms of travel writing. | The Boston Review
• Examining the state of short American fiction and interrogating the notion of “experimental” through New American Stories. | Guernica
• Julian Barnes unpacks the global brand of Van Gogh by reading the artist’s letters. | London Review of Books
• A real no-no: jumping into the pool that Hemingway’s wife built to spite him. | Oxford American
• The American Book Awards have been announced; winners include Marlon James, Laila Lalami, and Anne Waldman. | Before Columbus Foundation
• Nabokov’s linguistically rich life allowed him to create composite languages, in which jeans may be known as “blue cowboy trousers.” | Asymptote Journal
• Invention and understanding the unspoken in the (non-autofictive) novels of Atticus Lish. | Full Stop
• A history of the public library’s enviable inventions (a spinning book wheel) and many dangers (dampness, flames, rats, idiots). | Flavorwire
• Ernest Hemingway’s proto-standing desk, T.S. Eliot’s attempts at countouring, and other strange habits of renowned writers. | The Guardian
• Get your tabs ready: nearly 100 exceptional pieces of journalism from 2014. | The Atlantic
• From poetry to the Great Depression to prose: Raymond Chandler’s path to the American literary canon. | Biographile

And on Literary Hub:

• From job to job, book to book, the unemployed life of a professional writer on the west coast of Canada. | Literary Hub
• Poison control, sheep, fried eggs on corn flakes, and fire alarms: a tour diary by Rebecca Dinerstein for her debut novel, The Sunlit Night. | Literary Hub
• Remembering the first reading James Salter ever gave. | Literary Hub
• Ioannis Pappos on the rootless life of the boutique hotel set. | Literary Hub
• Tributes to the novelist Robert Stone, who died in January, from fellow pranksters and writers including Joyce Carol Oates, Tobias Wolff, and Ann Beattie. | Literary Hub

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