Best of the Week: March 7 – 11, 2016

TODAY: In 1922, Jack Kerouac is born. 

• “In Mexico City, you just feel the art boiling.” An interview with Álvaro Enrigue and Valeria Luiselli. | Vogue
• “Murder is something humans do to other humans. To pretend otherwise is to relieve ourselves of the need to think.” Catherine Lacey interviews Jonathan Lee. | The Paris Review
• “My greatest concern is always on a sentence level.” Porochista Khakpour on her first manuscript and forthcoming memoir. | Prairie Schooner
• Novelists Danielle Dutton, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Jon Methven, and Karan Mahajan cover a wide range of topics, from semen trafficking to the limits of language. | Salon
• Three cheers for thoughtful innovation, for playfulness that isn’t too showoffy, and for passionate eclecticism: An interview with Margo Jefferson. | Bookslut
• A short story collection that was smuggled out of North Korea, and whose anonymous author still resides there, will be published in English next year. | Melville House
• Brad Bigelow, independent blogger, dedicates his nights and weekends to rescuing worthy books from obscurity. | The New Yorker
• An interview with Gary Metras of Adastra Press, publishers of hand-crafted chapbooks since 1979. | Entropy
• “Do we inherit darkness, even at a few centuries’ remove?” Alex Mar on colonialism, ancestry, and Juan Ponce de Léon. | Oxford American
• “We need to keep doing the work of expanding of who we think the audience is.” Four questions with the National Book Foundation’s new executive director, Lisa Lucas. | Publishers Weekly
• “Sometimes I think that I’m just living.” An interview with Helen Oyeyemi. | Broadly
• “When a woman writes about sex, particularly a lot, it gives everyone a handy way to dismiss her writing as a whole.” Jenny Zhang and Charlotte Shane in conversation. | Medium
• For the New York Times Magazine music issue, George Saunders considers Wilco while Marlon James dissects Kendrick Lamar’s “The Blacker the Berry.” | The New York Times Magazine
• Cynthia Cruz on the “female poets who refuse to be silenced or, conversely, take their silence and use it”: Marguerite Duras, Herta Müller, and others. | Harriet
• “This is the kind of broad generalization that one expects from an elementary school class making pilgrim hats before Thanksgiving break.” On the opportunism of J. K. Rowling’s “History of Magic in North America.” | Tor

And on Literary Hub:

• “Books I wish I’d read as an LGBTQ teenager.” Queer writers on what they’d recommend to their past selves.
• Matthew Desmond on why we can’t fix poverty without fixing housing.
• Jonathan Lee on Fernando Pessoa, Joy Williams, German translators, and the deep disquiet of finishing your book.
• Twelve writers reflect on the high school English teacher who changed their life.
• Summer Brennan on the things writers do to promote their books.
• 33 life-changing books from VIDA, in honor of International Women’s Day.
• When America turns on its hyphenated citizens: Michelle Hoover on early 20th-century anti-German hysteria.
• When your life is in someone else’s hands: a reading list on dependency.
• A Phone Call from Paul: Paul Holdengraber calls Adam Phillips to discuss Wilde, writing, and the joy of Lacan.
• Geoff Dyer, Michael Croley, John Freeman, and Pico Iyerare in awe of the great Annie Dillard.
• Oscar Villalon reflects on the state of diversity in the book business.
• Here are the things you should worry about while writing a novel.
• The poetics of the apocalypse: Laura Sims and Kenneth Calhoun in conversation.

---