Best of the Week: May 16 – 20, 2016

TODAY: In 1910, French author Colette begins to publish her novel The Vagabond in serial form. 

• “Most of us Americans are Emersons: artful sermonizers, pathological point-makers, turntablists spinning the hits with future mischief in mind.” On televangelicals, creation myths, and the American essay. | The New Yorker
• “When I tell people this, they look at me like I have drowned a kitten.” On the Proustian experience of reading In Search of Lost Time on a cell phone. | The Atlantic
• Of bookish dreams and murder: On the impact of theory in Crime and Punishment. | The New Criterion
• Han Kang’s “exquisite and disturbing” The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, has won the Man Booker International Prize. | BBC
• Mary Gaitskill on girl-on-a-horse stories, dealing with criticism, and trusting her body while writing. | Guernica
• “I want (and wanted) to write short stories enough that it seemed worth doing despite how awful and difficult and uncomfortable it can be, figuring out how to make a short story work.” An interview with Kelly Link. | Masters Review
• “And that moment has never left me as the symbolic moment of my understanding that this was our place in an American war, that the Vietnam War was an American war from the American perspective and that, eventually, I would have to do something about that.” An interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen. | NPR
• In the conspiracy to end all conspiracies, Jonathan “Jon” Franzen was on Jeopardy and one of the categories was birds (but somehow he still didn’t win). | Vulture
• “My critics are at liberty to claim that I’m trying to convert children to Satanism. And I’m free to explain that I’m exploring human nature and morality, or to say, ‘You’re an idiot,’ depending on which side of the bed I got out of that day.” J.K. Rowling’s PEN Literary Service Award acceptance speech. | Wall Street Journal
• “You had just gotten so young/it was all I could do to contain you/in the linen dishtowel we kept for that purpose.” A poem by John Ashbery. | The Boston Review
• My characters, my avatars, dream of water, are drawn to its edge: Matthew Neill Null finds life in death on the edge of the Atlantic. | Guernica
• How Hunter S. Thompson’s “honest-to-God Dexedrine-fueled anxiety attack” in Las Vegas germinated into Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. | American Short Fiction
• Jonathan Lee on moments when the outside comes hurtling in, internal soundtracks, and Tristram Shandy–like aimlessness. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Are words non-renewable resources? On overused words, slothful disregard, and evolving meanings. | Flavorwire
• “Perhaps it is the air of the illicit that makes her unable to focus on economics.” A short story by Marie Calloway. | Playboy

And on Literary Hub:

• How to write deep in the woods with a dog by your side: Lee Clay Johnson’s post-MFA paradise.
• Am I a character in this Doris Lessing novel? The late Jenny Diski on the ethics of novelizing autobiography, from her memoir, In Gratitude.
• Bridget Read on Jenny Diski’s body of work that ends without an ending.
• Enrique Vila-Matas on the ever-growing mythology of Alejandra Pizarnik.
• David Foster Wallace’s new sentimentality and how the best commencement speech of all time was bad for literature.
• How Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love saved me.
• Janice P. Nimura on the mutability of history, and meeting the descendants of her subjects.
• What does it mean when we call women girls? Robin Wasserman on the unstoppable wave of “girl”-titled books.
• Salman Rushdie on memorizing poetry, being a reader, and going to the movies: part two of his conversation with Paul Holdengraber.
• How writers will steal your life and use it for fiction: a brief history of plagiarizing identity, from Leo Tolstoy to (ahem) Salman Rushdie.
• Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Mongrels, will read pretty much anything featuring werewolves.
• Announcing the 2016 O. Henry Prize stories, plus read six of the winning stories from Ottessa Moshfegh, Adrienne Celt, Robert Coover, and more.
• Jason Diamond talks to Robin Wasserman about the jump from YA to adult, and the power of the teenage girl.
• Bethanne Patrick’s picks 5 great beach reads for May, wherever you might be.
• For mystery writer Karin Salvalaggio, the wilds of Montana might be the scariest character of all.
• The unsung heroes of the poetry world: 11 poets on what it takes to run a small press.
• A brief look at a dark genre, the suicide memoir: true crime, mystery, and grief.
• On the 30th anniversary of Alex Haley’s classic, Nikki Giovanni on race, hope, fatherhood, and Roots.
• Garth Greenwell and Garrard Conley on their plans to visit North Carolina bookstores.
• Joyful tears: why Deborah Smith, translator of The Vegetarian, cried while accepting the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.
• How Frances Stroh survived the downfall of the family beer empire.

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