Best of the Week: May 11 – 15, 2015

TODAY: In 1717, Voltaire was banished from Paris and sent to the Bastille for satirizing the Regent. 

• “What do we make of [Saul] Bellow’s presentation of the typical intellectual as a virile many-wived, or at least many-lovered, creature?” Pray tell, Gary Shteyngart. | NYRB
• An official advisory: find a way, other than Shakespeare, to demonstrate your erudition in English. | Slate
• “Significant flattening of the point leads to the supposition that the original owner, Mr. Plato, talked and ate continuously.” Same, Mr. Plato. An excerpt from Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth. | BOMB Magazine
• Over the past decade, New York City has cut funding for libraries by 20%; let them know that we can withstand the garbage stench but not the loss of such valuable cultural institutions. | NYPL
• “I hope you don’t wear your hoodie up at night, not when it’s dark, and if we’re not with you.” On America’s rigid and regressive relationship with race. | AGNI
• Little government on the prairie: how Laura Ingalls Wilder became a libertarian matriarch. | TIME Magazine
• The recipients of this year’s PEN Literary Awards have been announced; the winners include Saeed Jones, Eliza Griswold, and Tina Howe. | PEN America
• A rollercoaster of emotions, from the dizzying heights of a One Direction concert to the terrifying depths of confronting death. | The Cut
• The gestation of a novel: Sara Nović’s (and Sam Lipsyte’s) drawings and notes from planning Girl at War. | Blunderbuss Magazine
• As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from fitful sleep, he found himself translated into all manners of monstrous vermin. | The Guardian
• Until Kindle figures out how to store sentiment, physical books will always have an emotional edge. | The New York Times
• O mighty Zeus, Trigger-er of Warnings: an argument against cautioning students about the content Ovid’s Metamorphoses (in which there are maybe two consensual relationships) and other classical texts. | The New Republic
• Kent Haruf’s final novel, which he wrote secretly and on his deathbed, is an ode to his love for his wife (trigger warning: countless tears). | The Wall Street Journal
• We usually rely on astrological occurrences but suppose there are also other methods for ordering one’s short stories. | Electric Literature

 

And on Literary Hub:

• “There is something about the study of creative writing that makes people—from both inside and outside the discipline—love to bash it.” Marian Palaia on the real world vs. MFA. | Literary Hub
• Yitzhak Gormezano Goren wrote Alexandrian Summer in 1978; he reflects on the process of resurrecting the novel 37 years later as it’s translated into English for the first time. | Literary Hub
• “Zink despises many of the conventions of contemporary novels and says she modeled [Mislaid] on Viennese operetta instead.” A conversation with Nell Zink | Literary Hub
• Rock musicians aren’t squeamish about selling their stuff, so why are writers? Jim Ruland on why he’s a hustler, baby. | Literary Hub
• Jabari Asim on the narratives of race and power in America, and on the importance of writing stories from your hometown. | Literary Hub
• Did Mark Z. Danielewski just reinvent the novel? | Literary Hub

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