Best of the Week: June 1 – 5, 2015

TODAY: In 1799, Alexander Pushkin is born. 

• Science fiction’s growing concern with gender and sexuality addresses “the ways in which the loss of social order and stability disproportionately affects women.” | The Los Angeles Review of Books
• Is Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life the long-awaited Great Gay Novel? | The Atlantic
• Authors behaving badly: original letters reveal D.H. Lawrence flirting with his sister-in-law, Lewis Carroll attempting to justify one of his “child friendships,” and more. | The Independent
• If you’re having trouble keeping up with our daily links, be prepared to feel OVERWHELMED: fiction issues from The New Yorker and VICE, featuring work from Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Ottessa Moshfegh, Deb Olin Unferth, and more. | The New Yorker, VICE
• Philip Larkin, who would have had the least fun at BEA, refused an Oxford poetry professorship due to the tedious parties it entailed. | The Guardian
• Overcoming “the eye-rolling factor” of a self-referential metafiction about a Brooklyn-based poet/novelist: on the irresistible charm of Ben Lerner. | Fiction Writers Review
• “I cannot hold my baby at the same time as I write.” A group of recent books interrogates the institution, implications, and indispensability of family. | Bookforum
• “I also know that many human beings have an innate resistance to baloney and a taste for quality rooted deeper than even marketing can reach,” attests eternal optimist and anti-Amazon advocate Ursula K. Le Guin. | Electric Literature
• “They drilled our throats and scattered / our limbs – / it was like an anatomy lesson!” Understanding the jihadis through their poetry. | The New Yorker
• Voyaging from the “isolated realms of the American poetry scene where other languages can seem as far away as lights in other galaxies” to the work of Catalan poet Melcion Mateu. | Boston Review
• The Windham-Campbell Prizes have announced that Hilton Als will deliver their keynote address, which will also become the inaugural book in their “Why I Write” series; Patti Smith will write the second. | Windham-Campbell Prizes
• In other news regarding “new writing” by Harper Lee, six of her “poignant and especially rare” letters to a childhood friend are expected to fetch $250,000 at auction. | LA Times
• Knausgaard, emo teen/Norse god, tells a confounded Charlie Rose that self-loathing “is a big part of [his] life,” among other things. | Flavorwire
• “If you are a woman and use yourself as a character, it has to be some sort of confessional, whereas if you’re a man, you’re actually doing some post-modern play on the novel.” Jeanette Winterson and Helen Macdonald on memoir. | The Guardian
• David and Goliath, if David were a coder instead of a little boy with a slingshot: an app that allows you to browse on Amazon but buy from independent bookstores. | Bookindy
• Love, Life, Death, and God: on Stephen King’s postmodern masterpiece, Roadwork. | Gawker Review of Books

And on Literary Hub:

• Discovering a once thriving Jewish community on North Main Street in Memphis, Tennessee. | Literary Hub
• Mark Haskell Smith and Geoff Dyer play ping-pong together. | Literary Hub
• Roxana Robinson on the sly feminism of the writer Elizabeth Taylor. | Literary Hub
• Interview with synesthete Quintan Ana Wikswo: “I like to imagine the intricate fireworks in the cerebral cortex as the visual center communes and crosses swords with the language center.” | Literary Hub
• Read fiction from Molly Antopol, Cynthia Bond, Phil Klay, Merrit Tierce, and Jack Livings—your PEN/Bingham Award shortlist. | Literary Hub

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