Best of the Week: Nov 30 – Dec 4, 2015

TODAY: In 1934, Joan Didion, tote bag model, is born. 

• Welcome to December!! Anticipating the thousands of year-end lists to follow, the most notable, underrated, best fiction, and top ten books of 2015. | The New York Times, The Slate Book Review, BuzzFeed Books, The New York Times Book Review
• Jeanette Winterson and Marlon James discuss sex and violence, the crisis generation, and Facebook rants. | The Guardian
• Junot Díaz, R.L. Stein, Angela Flournoy, and other authors share which books they are most #thankful for. | BuzzFeed Books
• Pugnacious Paglia vs. Silent Sontag: Benjamin Moser on Susan Sontag’s infamously boring visit to Bennington. | Literary Bennington
• “How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn’t mine?” Jhumpa Lahiri on navigating languages and learning Italian. | The New Yorker
• “Milk it until it’s dead,” and other thoughts on posthumous publishing. | The Boston Globe
• Talking with a cultural Sasquatch: Edmund de Waal discusses the “investigation-travelogue-memoir-history of his lifelong experiences with porcelain.” | Hazlitt
• “Did he teach us anything about writing? No, not really.” Susan Taylor Chehak interviews her former teacher, John Irving. | Guernica
• Thoughts on T. Geronimo Johnson’s Welcome to Braggsville, which range from Prep to Absalom, Absalom! | Public Books
• The Latin American literature of biblioklepts, bibliomaniacs, and bibliophiles beyond Roberto Bolaño. | Full Stop
• “‘The quality of the Paris agreement equals the quality of life for the most vulnerable.’ Or the quantity of death.” Rebecca Solnit reports from the Paris climate summit. | Harper’s Magazine
• Publishing father figure Michael Pietsch calmly and once again assuages our collective existential crisis. | The Wall Street Journal
• Zadie Smith on the elegant explosion of binary thinking, childlike innocence in the face of literary artifice, and how NW could have been called Goodbye to All That. | The White Review
• “I, we, don’t need to read more diverse books—We’re reading them, we’ve written them, we’ve lived them.” A letter to the American literary community from the diversity (channeled by Morgan Parker). | Harriet
• “Is the novel dead because MFA programs are fighting a genre war with unlikable characters?” On the misconceptions and countless thinkpieces about genre and literary fiction. | Electric Literature

And on Literary Hub:

• The late Paul West remembers a Newfoundland that time forgot. | Literary Hub
• Molly Crabapple on life as a Tumbleweed in Paris’s Shakespeare and Co. | Literary Hub
• The joy of writing about Bob Ross—creator of worlds, master of happy accidents—and his iconic PBS show, The Joy of Painting. | Literary Hub
• Part two of Edwidge Danticat’s conversation with Paul Holdengraber: on death, Haiti, and silver linings. | Literary Hub
• Marlon James is not the Updike of Jamaica: John Freeman talks to the Booker Prize winner about the year that was. | Literary Hub
• The man who made millions from old comics in a closet, which almost ended up in the bin. | Literary Hub
• How A Public Space editor Brigid Hughes rediscovered the lost genius of Bette Howland (along with her trove of letters from Saul Bellow). | Literary Hub

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