
Best of the Week: June 20 - 24, 2016
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1926, poet Ingeborg Bachmann is born.
- “The objective for me is to find a language that tells the reader something hard to define about the texture of each character’s consciousness.” An interview with Adam Haslett. | The Guardian
- Once there were femme fatales, and now there are girls: Why women are writing today’s best crime fiction. | The Atlantic
- In which a dad who had abandoned fiction twenty-five years prior falls in love with Jane Eyre. | The Hairpin
- “My sadness was so great that I only could have loved Either/Or more if it had literally been covered with dirt.” Emma Straub reflects on her college devotion to Elliott Smith. | The Paris Review
- Body snatchers and Byronic heroes: On the literary tradition of objectifying women’s corpses. | Hazlitt
- “While many book lovers may be tempted to gloat, the death of Barnes & Noble would be catastrophic—not just for publishing houses and the writers they publish, but for American culture as a whole.” Why we still need Barnes & Noble. | The New Republic
- “The understanding of gender that Gender Trouble suggests is not only recognizable; it is pop.” A profile of Judith Butler, featuring an infographic of cats explaining gender performativity. | The Cut
- “A war doesn’t end simply because we say it does, and a war isn’t simply the things that happen on the battlefield… To me, war is a much more expansive beast.” Speaking with Viet Thanh Nguyen. | The New York Times
- Voltaire the scammer: How the French philosopher made a fortune by outsmarting one of the earliest lotteries. | Lapham’s Quarterly
- “When people can’t fight you, they say, ‘Why are you so pessimistic?’ It’s a different question than ‘Are you correct?’” An interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates. | Playboy
- Bravery is easier for the dying: A short story by C.E. Morgan. | Oxford American
- “I realized there were loads of novels that were good that weren’t in English, and I realized there was something I could do.” Speaking with Don Bartlett, Knausgaard’s English translator. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- The James Baldwin House Association has launched in order to “protect, acquire and renovate Baldwin’s home in Provence and eventually to create a residency for artists and writers as well as a center for progressive thought and culture.” | James Baldwin Foundation
- Behold the origins of Angel Catbird, the superhero from Margaret Atwood’s graphic novel. | BuzzFeed Books
- Must the novel as a form always stand in the shadow of the institution of marriage? On female bachelor narratives, from Elizabeth Hardwick to Sheila Heti. | The Point
And on Literary Hub:
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- The next wave in publishing? Indie presses are opening indie bookstores, and it is good.
- Ten Arab women writers we’d love to see translated.
- Remembering the great James Salter, a year after his death.
- On Ethel Rosenberg, mother to two sons.
- Lionel Shriver on the Catch-22 of returning to books like Catch-22.
- America is a classless society—and other foundational myths that just won’t die.
- Martin Walker on finding inspiration for his Inspector Bruno Series in an ancient French valley.
- Dead dogs are more than metaphors: on the burden of killing an animal and the stories that take it for granted.
- Dorthe Nors on the invisibility of middle-aged women.
- Virginia Heffernan on the hallucinatory splendor of the internet.
- 5 important works of eco-fiction you need to read.
- The dystopian future in which everyone is the boss: on the blurring lines between worker, manager, employer, and employee.
- Laurie Anderson on the time she invented a sport with Anne Carson: part two of her phone call with Paul Holdengraber.
- On the harrowing unreality of life in contemporary China, and the new literary genre that seeks to capture it.
- Christos Ikonomou, accidental prophet of a country in crisis.
- An outlier in Ogden: Judith Freeman on growing up Mormon.
- How writing about Pit Bulls led to death threats, online and IRL: on the firestorm around Bronwen Dickey’s new book.
- LeBron James, hero of his own Homeric epic.
- Dante, Auschwitz, and the world beyond the sun: Louis Begley’s life with the Divine Comedy.
BuzzFeed Books
Hazlitt
James Baldwin Foundation
Lapham’s Quarterly
lithub daily
Los Angeles Review of Books
Oxford American
Playboy
The Atlantic
The Cut
The Guardian
The Hairpin
The New Repulic
The New York Times
The Paris Review
The Point

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