Best of the Week: June 20 – 24, 2016

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:

• 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.

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