Best of the Week: June 27 - July 1, 2016

• I didn’t really imagine this, not really: Reflections on the Brexit. | n+1
• Lorrie Moore on recent biographies of Helen Gurley Brown and her “imprecisely feminist” legacy. | NYRB
• “By casting my book as personal rather than professional—by marketing me as a woman on a journey of self-discovery, rather than a reporter on a groundbreaking assignment—I was effectively being stripped of my expertise on the subject I knew best.” Suki Kim on the miscategorization of her work of investigative journalism as memoir. | The New Republic
• Exploring the “girl-to-girl current that leads teens to shirk off the prescribed narrative of girlhood in favor of something more thrilling:” On Girls on Fire and The Girls. | The Hairpin
• From Clan Corgi Butts to Trash Clan: Tony Tulathimutte on Clash of Clans, not quite addictive smartphone strategy game and “itch that feels good to scratch.” | Real Life
• Melania decided she would order the flowers herself: A Donald Trump-inspired short story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. | The New York Times Book Review
• Geoff Dyer on narrative propulsion, flickering back and forth between comedy and seriousness, and pilgrimages. | Hazlitt
• Books should have a purpose: Jesse Ball on lucid dreaming, the refuge of reading, and how lying is our stock-in-trade. | Chicago Magazine
• “ONLY FOR GROWN-UPS. NERVOUS TYPES—BEWARE!” An early fragment of fiction by Walter Benjamin. | BOMB Magazine
• “This is why, with my dying mother in the passenger seat of the car, I drove through a storm that turned the entire sky an impenetrable white.” On the Negro Motorist Green Book and travelling across America while black. | The Toast
• An interview with Mark Singer, whose 1997 profile of Donald Trump described him as “an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul” (and who Trump later described as a “total loser”). | VICE
• Of course the Grand Canyon was a vagina, and other insights: Cheryl Strayed, Alexander Chee, Patricia Lockwood, Adelle Waldman, and Kate Christensen on significant visits to national parks. | The New York Times
• “My America opens its arms to the world rather than sells the world its arms.” Viet Thanh Nguyen on immigration. | TIME
• “I am not recommending life by planner. I am just confessing that I know no other way.” Helen Phillips on recording her life and the joys and tragedies one cannot plan for. | BuzzFeed Books
• Deep vs. light reading: How different levels of textual engagement influence writing. | Quartz

Also on Literary Hub:

• Eileen Myles on guns, gays and pride.
• Why superheroes are bigger than their stories.
• Zinzi Clemmons on the importance of editors of color, and what it means to be an inclusive literary journal.
• Writing must explore its relation to power: Robert Glück on the beginnings of new narrative.
• Robert Stone on how Michael Herr transcended New Journalism, and told the story of Vietnam unlike anyone else.
• The wife (a writer) interviews the husband (also a writer): Carrie Brown talks with John Gregory Brown about his new novel.
• John Berger tells a fish story (and more).
• What kind of writer are you: cook and baker?
• Bethanne Patrick recommends nine great thrillers written by women.
• Stephen King has legible handwriting: an old note on the origin of Scott Landon’s driving music.
• The seven stages of love, revealed by seven French love poems.
• The unyielding rituals of little Britain: Homer Sykes’ document of rural English tradition, 40 years on.
• Why does anyone write? Alice Adams on why writing a novel is a painful and bloody process.
• Literary or genre, it’s the plot that counts: Emily Barton on the importance of moving a story forward.
• On the murder of bloggers, and Bangladesh’s greatest living writer, Tahmima Anam.
• Is the Caine Prize for emergent African writing, or the best African writing?
• Frauds on the internet: when online friendships falter in real life.
• We pick the 21 books you should read in July.
• How Clay Byars battled paralysis to finish his memoir.
• Some pictures of ice cream and books, because this is what you need on the ultimate summer Friday.