Best of the Week: June 15 – 19, 2015

YESTERDAY: James Salter died at age 90. 

• The great James Salter has died. At The Paris Review, read his Art of Fiction interview; at The New Yorker, read Nick Paumgarten’s 2013 profile of the writer and Salter’s short story, “Last Night.” | The Paris Review, The New Yorker
• Peering into Elizabeth Bishop’s closets, closets, and more closets: Colm Tóibín approximates biography through a close reading of the poet’s work. | The Weekly Standard
• Azar Nafisi on writing with the awareness that Big Brother is always watching. | The New York Times Sunday Book Review
• On China’s favorite little capitalist, Zhanmusi Qiaoyisi (also known as James Joyce). | The Guardian
• “In some ways, it was inevitable that Carl, a few nights later, would take a picture of his balls and send it to the Mayflower e-mail list.” A short story by Ben Marcus. | The New Yorker
• Live-tweeting pain as a secular ritual for grieving: on over-sharing, memoir, and imposing meaning onto meaninglessness. | Full Stop
• Viet Thanh Nguyen on the debt he owes to Ralph Ellison, who treats “marginalized experience as universal experience.” | Library of America’s Reader’s Almanac
• Joshua Cohen may have finally written the long-awaited “novel for the Facebook age,” in which the excellence of his writing may excuse his comparing breasts to young fawns. | Bookforum
• The newly-crowned king of the controversial reading list has compiled one about “passing across racial boundaries.” | The New York Times
• It’s pronounced Na-BOW-kov, and other shocking discoveries: an interview with Nabokov’s most recent biographer. | Biographile
• Hypertext and hand jobs: an annotated excerpt from Maya Lang’s riff on Ulysses. | The Rumpus
• “I mean, do you think you’re as talented as Faulkner and Hemingway?” On the sexism, slights, and cinematic dreams that accompany a first novel’s publication. | Medium
• Melville House has sent copies of The Torture Report to all presidential candidates in hopes that they will “clarify [their] position[s] on the legality, morality, and efficacy of torture.” | Melville House
• “The existential question of who is black has been answered in the most concussive way possible.” –Jelani Cobb. “Take down the flag. Take it down now. Put it in a museum. Inscribe beneath it the years 1861-2015.” –Ta-Nehisi Coates. “The black church hasn’t been safe since there has been a black church.” –Jamil Smith. | The New Yorker,  The Atlantic, The New Republic
• Christy Wampole on the history and etymology of “awkward” and the acceptability of breaking up with someone via text. | Guernica
• Your daily reminder that bookstores occupy vital roles in their communities: Istanbul’s newly opened Pages serves as a cultural oasis, meeting ground, and educational center. | NPR

And on Literary Hub:

• Roberto Clemente and the greatest forgotten home run of all time. | Literary Hub
• Genre wars, Amazon, and how David Foster Wallace’s “Mister Squishy” can explain the market for heart. | Literary Hub
• Laura Dave on the joy of “…18 grueling months, 97,000 words, and 500 pages of research—all of which I would eventually toss into a recycling bin in northern California, off Highway 12.” | Literary Hub
• Jeff Oaks fell in love with Donny Osmond at the age of eight. Life didn’t get any simpler after that. | Literary Hub
• On the beauty of a house filled with stacks (and stacks, and stacks) of books. | Literary Hub
• Malcolm Brooks on the book that changed his life. | Literary Hub

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