Best of the Week: May 9 – 13, 2016

TODAY: In 1925, Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway is published. 

• “I don’t do it for anyone else. I do it because I have the addict’s need to get lost in the story.” An interview with Louise Erdrich. | The New York Times
• “I’ve settled on porn, come to a decision that my next book after this one will be devoted to relentless, often hardcore pornography.” Lydia Millet reveals her contingency plan. | Salon
• “It is not George Eliot he would like to pour out tea.” Virginia Woolf on what encourages affection towards authors, republished in honor of Vogue’s 100th anniversary. | Vogue
• “The world of taffeta and lace exists only on the surface; underneath it, these well-bred young women are trapped like rats.” On Jane Austen as a chronicler of pain. | The American Scholar
• Ta-Nehisi Coates on the genesis and evolution of Between the World and Me, from a freelance piece to a hypothetical a compilation of Civil War essays to a source of literary celebrity. | The Atlantic
• “I want a poetics of translation that is not just anti-assimilationist.” Against neutrality in translating. | World Literature Today
• “For the novel, the orphan is the skeleton key to narrative tension, reader empathy, and moral awakening.” On literature’s long-standing fascination with, and reliance on, orphan narratives. | Hazlitt
• You revolt me stewing in your consumption: On the long history of literary hate mail, from William Hazlitt to online commenters. | The New Republic
• “The devil has several names and Lucifer is one.” New short fiction from Hilary Mantel. | London Review of Books
• Meet nine Greek writers who are redefining poetry in the midst of the austerity crisis. | The Guardian
• Hello to all that: Jami Attenberg on moving to New Orleans to write. | Lenny Letter
• “With Rich came the formulation of an alternate poetic tradition that distrusted and questioned paternalistic, heteronormative, and hierarchical notions of what it meant to have a voice, especially for female writers.” Claudia Rankine on Adrienne Rich. | The New Yorker
• Pamela Erens discusses trauma, childbirth, and her new novel Eleven Hours. | Tin House
• “I asked everyone I met what ‘freedom’ meant. Fathers and children had very different answers.” An excerpt from Svetlana Alexievich’s Second Hand Time. | The Times Literary Supplement
• Lucas Mann on the importance of the unsaid and erasing himself from his own memoir. | Catapult

And on Literary Hub:

• Anton Chekhov: a post-modernist way ahead of his time.
• No one is writing the real West Virginia: Matthew Neill Null on why rural lives and literature are in crisis.
• Interrogating sentimentality with Leslie Jamison.
• Using crime fiction to present fully formed Muslim characters.
• Why fiction needs more woman scientists.
• The winner of the Restless Books New Immigrant Writing Prize.
• Rick Moody on the dark power of infidelity, and whether or not you should have an affair.
• Europa Editions’ Michael Reynolds on Elena Ferrante’s class consciousness, the art of translation, and Rome vs. NYC.
• Garrard Conley survived ‘ex-gay’ therapy and it made him a better writer.
• Louise Erdrich on five books in her life, from Ivan Turgenev to Ann Patchett.
• Salman Rushdie talks to Paul Holdengraber about letter as fiction, fairy tales, and drinking with Gunter Grass.
• Amanda Nadelberg offers advice on how to write a book of poems.
• New Arabic fiction: The Common celebrates contemporary writing from across the Arab world.
• In defense of grown men crying: on feeling deeply and writing as an act of exploration.
• 10 German books by women we’d love to see in English.
• I am Jessa Crispin’s problem with publishing: Bethanne Patrick on careerism, criticism, and a life in books.
• When two feminists of color fall in love: Ana Castillo on validation, rivalry, and other women.
• Eight writing lessons from Hamilton: The Revolution.

---