Best of the Week: November 23 – 25, 2015

TODAY: In 1582, William Shakespeare marries Anne Hathaway, to whom he eventually bequeaths his second-best bed. 

• The authors of the best books of the year (according to Publishers Weekly) present the other best books of the year (according to themselves). | Publishers Weekly
• National Book Award winners Adam Johnson and Ta-Nehisi Coates discuss Tupac holograms and fusing poetry and journalism, respectively. | The New York Times
• Wherever you go for the rest of your life Paris stays with you: Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, copies of which are being left as tribute to the victims of the Paris attacks, has become a bestseller in France. | NPR
• Words don’t need visas, but humans do: Molly Crabapple on translating Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani and the loaded fiction of citizenship. | VICE
• To ease their frustration with novellas, the New Yorker is launching an online-only feature for them. | The New Yorker
• “Let us burn this motherfucking system to the ground and build something better.” Claire Vaye Watkins on defying categories and no longer pandering to the little white man deep inside of all of us. | Tin House
• On the “reality-concealing rhetoric of Westernism” in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. | n+1
• “My method is the magpie’s: I look for shiny things.” Luc Sante on his writing process, the year 1910, and the hypocrisy championships. | Guernica
• “This is the plight of the average deaf character: to be plagued by the hearing author’s own discomfort with the idea of silence.” Sara Nović on the (mostly) successful, deaf protagonist of The Stand. | The Believer
• Migrating identities and migrating forms: 50 of the best books from independent presses this year. | Flavorwire
• Orhan Pamuk on writers who talk about food with relish, miniature discussions of identity, and pinning bits of daily life into a novel. | Hazlitt
• William Finnegan on surfing to the “spooky bass riff” and “jagged cymbal beat” of “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” by The Animals. | Wall Street Journal
• We tell our doctors stories in order to live: On Terrance Holt’s Internal Medicine and the narratives of our bodies. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “Memory drives memoir, but it can take writing to realize that while we thought we were just living, history was unfolding.” Honor Moore defends the memoir, shares a poem that also is one. | TriQuarterly
• There’s a sorry situation in the United States: My Life on the Road, The Notorious RBG, and America’s fraught history with abortion law. | Signature Reads

And on Literary Hub:

• A very entertaining interview with Jerry Stahl, an old new Dad. | Literary Hub
• “When Did You Start to Think of Yourself As African?” Ivan Vladislavić answers some tough questions from Nuruddin Farah. | Literary Hub
• Kathleen Alcott on the ghosts of Thanksgivings past. | Literary Hub
• The moment that changed the Cold War forever: when James B. Donovan met his client, a Soviet master spy. | Literary Hub
• Tommy Pico on how to pass the time on a holiday commemorating the destruction of his ancestors. | Literary Hub
• The consumerist canon: a Black Friday reading list. | Literary Hub

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