Best of the Week: May 31 – June 3, 2016

TODAY: In 1917, the first Pulitzer prizes are awarded in four categories: biography, history, editorial writing, and reporting. Today, there are 21 categories. 

• Ocean Vuong on learning English and the first poem he ever wrote, “If a Boy Could Dream.” | The New Yorker
• In the wake of the Arab Spring, a new wave of dystopic, surrealist fiction has taken root in the Middle East. | The New York Times
• Christie’s is set to auction a “legendary” first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland next month—one of just 22 surviving copies. | The Guardian
• Whit Stillman, the director of Love & Friendship discusses his failed career as a writer and adapting Jane Austen for the screen. | Hazlitt
• “It was Marcel’s apartment, and seven people were dancing.” A never before published story by Langton Hughes. | The New Yorker
• How Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ evangelical Left Behind Rapture–thrillers can teach us about America’s “Money Cult.” | Gawker
• Keeping up with the Kar-Dashwood sisters: what today’s reality TV stars have in common with Jane Austen’s 19th-century heroines. | The Atlantic
• On Gaelic, Hindi, and language as a colonized space. | The Toast
• Terry Castle on Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt as a species of crime fiction. | Bookforum
• Heidi Julavits remembers Soup for the King, the children’s book that inspired her former love of soup for breakfast on cold Maine mornings. | Extra Crispy
• Michelle Dean on the vagueness and ubiquity of “liminality,” which boasts a 14,000 word Wikipedia entry. | The Awl
• “I personally feel that no one gives a shit about my books—maybe I’m just a pessimist—and that idea feels horrible and refreshing at the same time.” A conversation between Ottessa Moshfegh and Daniel Saldaña París, descendants of the same galaxy. | BOMB Magazine
• A sort of asteroid has hit the safe world of Russian literature in English translation: Janet Malcolm on the more recent translation of Anna Karenina. | NYRB
• Ben Lerner, Marguerite Duras, Robin Wasserman, and more: highly anticipated books coming out this month. | Flavorwire, BuzzFeed Books
• Using the most reliable source of information available (the stars), a group of astronomers and a physicist have dated one of Sappho’s poems. | Hyperallergic

And on Literary Hub:

• On the night Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston. (RIP, Muhammad Ali.)
• Finding poems in my own labyrinth: Emily Carr on the minotaur that broke her heart.
• What to do when no one shows up to your reading.
• Alexander Hemon: why I didn’t sign the open letter against Trump.
• How to tell the future with books: from bibliomancy to chance encounters, books that have changed lives.
• On the false promises of romantic love: Paul Holdengraber calls Alain de Botton on the telephone.
• 13 books you should read this June (not a summer preview!).
• On writing Islamic identity and being labeled a political writer: a conversation between Leila Aboulela and Elnathan John.
• Seven ways to hand-sell Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, a lost modern masterpiece.
• When American was on the brink of a second revolution: an oral history of campus revolts in the 1970s.
• Helen Phillips on body image, motherhood, and owning your idiosyncratic self.
• Secrets of the book designer: sometimes I don’t read the whole book (and that’s OK).
• Jose Orduña on the hollow spectacle of attaining American citizenship.

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