Best of the Week: November 16 – 20, 2015

TODAY: In 1748, the first installment of Fanny Hill, the first American erotic novel, is published. Here is the 1910 cover. 

• “Now, we are all Parisians and that at least, in a dark time, is a matter of pride.” Ian McEwan (and others) on the horrific attacks in Paris. | Edge.org
• To form the English language: Germanize Celtic, sprinkle liberally with the verb “do,” filter through Old Norse, add French and Latin, let sit for 1,600 years. | Aeon
• “Who the fuck asks anyone to write a poem?” Saul Williams on writing a book about America, activism, and middle-finger-themed poems. | BuzzFeed Books
• “You’re just going with the usual all-American fantasy? You don’t wish to banish any memory of the dead?” A short story by Ann Beattie. | The New Yorker
• “I want, with all my heart, to preserve and celebrate what ISIS wishes to destroy: a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-cultural life.” Laila Lalami responds to the attacks in Paris, Beirut, and around the world. | The Nation
• Don DeLillo’s new novel, Zero K, will tackle eternal life (and be published in May). | LA Times
• The boundaries are necessarily hazy: Valeria Luiselli on fiction vs. non-fiction, the separate realms of her works, and the blurring of fiction and life. | Vol. 1 Brooklyn
• Claudia Rankine on making research into a transparent reality, and the value of MFAs, and the importance of feeling to a poet. | The Spectacle
• An urgent need to speak, a claim to honesty, and a sort of wisdom: Lorin Stein enumerates the qualities he looks for in fiction, crystallized in Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” | The Atlantic
• The National Book Awards were announced: Ta-Nehisi Coates won the Nonfiction award for Between the World and Me and the Poetry award went to Robin Coste Lewis for Voyage of the Sable Venus. The Fiction award went to Adam Johnson for Fortune Smiles: Stories. | The National Book Foundation
• How William Blake’s erotic writing preserved his legacy (unlike the contenders for this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award). | NYRB, The Guardian
• Celebrating the poetry of colors, objects, rooms: On Goodnight Moon as a descendent of Gertrude Stein. | Public Books
• “It made me want to throw up.” The rise of million-dollar bids on literary debuts. | The Wall Street Journal
• “The whale as landfill. It was a metaphor, and then it wasn’t.” On watching a beached whale slowly suffer and die. | Granta
• Facilitate more threads about David Foster Wallace: One brave troll’s quest to elevate Reddit conversations. | The Daily Dot

And on Literary Hub:

• French historian Arlette Farge remembers Michel Foucault on the streets of Paris. | Literary Hub
• There is never any ending to Paris, city of light and art. | Literary Hub
• A brief history of pet cemeteries, rituals, and how we mourn our dead pets. | Literary Hub
• Lauren Groff on the politics at play in her NBA-nominated book, Fates and Furies. | Literary Hub
• Robert Hughes on how Andrew Wyeth’s “secret” Helga paintings triggered an unprecedented media frenzy. | Literary Hub
• Rebecca Solnit on 80 books (give or take) no woman should read (inspired by that Esquire list that just… won’t… die…). | Literary Hub
• Are we different people in different languages? Being a multilingual writer in the 21st century. | Literary Hub
• On turning board games into books, and books into board games. | Literary Hub
• Paul Holdengraber calls Edwidge Danticat on the telephone, within minutes they’re talking all about death. | Literary Hub
• How Sophie Calle became an artist. | Literary Hub

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