Best of the Week: March 21 – 25, 2016

TODAY: In 1892, Walt Whitman dies, is laid to rest in the tomb he designed and built himself. 

• “There are many worthy writers languishing in moldy archives, and I would venture to say that the majority of them are women.” On recovering forgotten women writers and the unknown genius of Constance Fenimore Woolson. | Slate
• Catherine Lowell shares three lessons she learned from writing about the Brontë sisters, of whom there is still, apparently, much left to say. | The Daily Beast
• “They start with the extremely personal (and sometimes deliberately perverse) in order to evoke the cold, impassable space between self and other.” On autofiction and the empathy novels (used to) encourage. | The Atlantic
• I am trying to find out what endures: An interview with Helen Oyeyemi. | NPR
• Alex Mar writes about “Nerd Queen, a person of rare esoteric knowledge” and “Mother of Modern Witchcraft,” Doreen Valiente. | Tin House
• On the rising popularity of Korean literature, France’s Livre Paris fair, and the “politics of literary creation and translation.” | Ploughshares
• On poet and artist Marcel Broodthaers’s legacy and “idea of belgitude,” considered in the aftermath of the Brussels attacks. | The New Yorker
• The newly founded Lulu Fund presents its findings on inclusiveness in academia, which are (sadly, unsurprisingly) not great. | Salon
• How to approach the widely known yet infrequently read Dante, 750 years after his birth. | The American Scholar
• The Whiting Awards were announced; winners include Mitchell S. Jackson, Catherine Lacey, and Ocean Vuong. | Whiting Awards
• “Camus had become the one marketable export left to a bloodied and brutalized country.” On Camus’ single (and absurd) visit to America. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Perhaps a new way of reading can produce a better way to live: On the new edition of Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics and its lasting legacy. | The New Republic
• Karan Mahajan on flying while brown, unshaven, and carrying a manuscript entitled The Association of Small Bombs. | Catapult
• “A strange story, but this is a strange country.” John Jeremiah Sullivan on the “twisted past” and “ambitious revival” of Shuffle Along, one of the first successful all-black Broadway musicals. | The New York Times Magazine
• “A literary text is not defined by its relation to truth or imagination.” Is the dichotomy between fiction and nonfiction itself a fiction? | The Guardian

And on Literary Hub:

• One country, two debut novelists, two book tours, twelve cities: Carly Hallman and Bette Adriaanse see America.
• Githa Hariharan on Kashmir: reconciling a border state with a dream state.
• Irishman Dan Sheehan chases down the Irish Arts Center’s NYC book-giveaway on St. Patrick’s Day, experiences nostalgia.
• Revisiting Joan Didion’s remarkable essay, “Sentimental Journeys,” as a way to understand Donald Trump.
• Lisa Levy on Chris Pavone’s finely wrought espionage fiction and why the best spies are married.
• A brief history of New York values: David Reid on the seething immorality of 1940s Greenwich Village, and a Democratic party at war with itself.
• On Emily Dickinson’s self-creation (or why Emily Jr. “annihilated” Emily Sr.).
• Why I chose to write in English: Ayelet Tsabari on the power of a foreign language.
• Shirley Barrett goes deep into domestic research, learns how to be a whaler’s wife in 1908 (boil everything, wash the clothes in gin).
• The suicide note as literary genre: on the last words of Woolf, Koestler, Berryman, and more.
• Claire Vaye-Watkins returns to the desert hometown she once escaped, talks to her teenage self.
• Kaitlyn Greenidge and Angela Flournoy talk race, research, and the high-stakes choices of debut novelists.
• Sarah Schulman, correcting the Canon 10 books at a time.
• Truth a trauma, behind bars: Mira Ptacin on teaching memoir writing in prison.
• The first rule of novel-writing is don’t write a novel: Elizabeth Percer’s nine non-rules for writing.
• Kwame Dawes on rhythm, diaspora, and political poetry.
• Catalan writer Toni Sala travels 50,000 kilometers back and forth and to America, is unimpressed.

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