Best of the Week: June 22 – 26, 2015

TODAY: In 1928, Sylvia Beach hosts a dinner party so that F. Scott Fitzgerald can meet James Joyce. 

• “Historically, there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained or dead black body to gaze upon or to hear about or to position a self against.” Claudia Rankine reflects on the murders in Charleston. | The New York Times Magazine
• A new contender rises in the life experience vs. MFA debate: Twitter. | Pacific Standard
• The Word became flesh: on the religious writing of Flannery O’Connor. | NPR
• In which Celeste Ng artfully uses the word “grapple,” deconstructs Asian-American stereotypes, and reveals tricks for getting people to think about race. | The Oyster Review
• We are all cheats and liars: on the unnamed, hybrid genre lying somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. | The Millions
• Valeria Luiselli reviews The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector, who “strips language to the bone, in search of some kind of metaphysical core or nucleus.” | Publishers Weekly
• One intrepid reader attempts to justify the “lightness” of Milan Kundera’s new novel; others, most likely, will stick with schadenfreude. | The Huffington Post
• The novella is having an existential crisis, asserts that it is not merely a shorter version of the novel. | The Times Literary Supplement
• We may have to bid literary mini-scandals farewell: publishers are beginning to hire fact-checkers. | Vulture
• “Olga represents all my fears for my future and all the pain and suffering I’ve already endured.” Paula Bomer on reading Days of Abandonment after her father’s suicide. | Vol. 1 Brooklyn
• On the “landscapes of meaning and meaningful landscapes” in Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry. | Tin House
• “In Rio de Janeiro the average distance between humans is shorter.” Writing by Gonçalo M. Tavares. | Granta
• An experimental Argentine writer is facing possible jail time for his Borgesian remix of Borges. | The Guardian
• On Saul Bellow’s Jewish heritage, which played a fundamental role in the development of his revolutionary, “decorative, unashamedly expressive” language. | The Times of Israel
• Thirty years after the genre-defining Blood Meridian (and four years after the stunning film Cowboys & Aliens), revisionist Westerns are having a proper literary moment. | Electric Literature

And on Literary Hub:

• A conversation with Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear, the quiet rebels of Russian translation. | Literary Hub
• Brian Castner, writer, bomb technician in Iraq, on being one of the few people in the world to have his life turned into an opera. | Literary Hub
• Mia Alvar, Sara Nović, and Boris Fishman on physical, emotional, and literary diasporas. | Literary Hub
• Haruki Murakami  on the exact moment he knew he’d be a novelist and the birth of his kitchen table fiction. | Literary Hub
• Josh Cook on the highs and lows of being both a bookseller and a writer, including “the psychotic mix of euphoria and anxiety when someone picks up a copy of my book and walks around the store with it.” | Literary Hub
• Eight writers on how to be a woman on Twitter. | Literary Hub
• When life got worse than fiction, Joelle Renstrom broke up with her novel to write a memoir. | Literary Hub

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