Best of the Week: May 4 – 8, 2015

TODAY:We think fondly of that ‘perfect’ mother, Mrs. March, or Marmee, who said: “I am angry nearly ever day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it.”

 

• “I thought, ‘This is a rather interesting landscape.’ Particularly the panting ogres.” In The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro expands a single Arthurian stanza into a novel. | Guernica
• The end will continue to be nigh: on apocalyptic literature’s bright future. | NPR
• Stories were certainly not the only creepy and morbid remnants Edgar Allan Poe left behind; people enthusiastically collect little bits of his hair. | Atlas Obscura
• I am not a joke: Shelia Heti’s short story on death, loneliness, and figuring out why the chicken crossed the road. | The New Yorker
• On the eve of McSweeny’s 18^th birthday it will turn into a nonprofit, but only with your help.  Donate to its Kickstarter, reap your quirky rewards, and help maintain the vibrancy of independent publishing. | Kickstarter
• Don’t let them read lit: United Airlines is launching Rhapsody, an in-flight literary magazine that will be available to their first-class and business-class customers (but not you other plebeians). | The New York Times
• Buried at the end of this piece about last night’s PEN Awards is another honoree, Khadija Ismayilova, an investigative journalist imprisoned in Azerbaijan for her reporting on government corruption, though “few [guests] mustered the same enthusiasm” to celebrate her award. | The Guardian, Radio Free Europe
• In what may soon become the plot of a Nicolas Cage film, scholars have uncovered over 100 previously unread stories written by Mark Twain. | BuzzFeed
• An introduction to introductions (and forewords, and prefaces). | The Millions
• Tea with Harold Bloom, Valentina (his stuffed ostrich), MacGregor (a wombat toy), and Gorilla Gorilla (self-explanatory). | Vulture
• Werner Herzog wrote a diaristic novel 40 years ago; it was about walking 600 miles through the snow to magically keep his friend alive. Suck it, Knausgaard. | LA Times
• “I tend to learn more deeply through failure, so I want to see people failing in stories.” Will Chancellor interviews Catherine Lacey. | The White Review
• In awards: Alice Notley has won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize; the finalists for the Best Translated Book Awards were announced. | Poets & Writers, Three Percent
• Junot Díaz, libro-phile, wrote a letter advocating for the New York Public Library. | GalleyCat
• Haruki Murakami, advice columnist, on the end of the world, terrorists, and the boundaries of logic. | The Japan Times

And on Literary Hub:

• An interview with Paul Beatty on his new novel and still-racial satire. | Literary Hub
• Maggie Nelson says that The Argonauts “wasn’t a book I was aiming to write.” | Literary Hub
• Photographer and memoirist Sally Mann does, in fact, have a file called “Maternal Slights,” where she “wrote all my mother’s slights down. There were so many of them.” | Literary Hub
• Jim Shepard on Janusz Korczak, innocence, and the Holocaust. | Literary Hub
• Christie Watson on trans-racial adoption: “The day I met my daughter was much like the day I gave birth: filled with anxiety, and happiness, and love.” | Literary Hub

---