Best of the Week: November 9 – 13, 2015

TODAY: In 1907, Astrid Lindgren, Swedish author of the Pippi Longstockings series, is born. 

• Language as an end in itself: Exploring what makes an essay literary. | The Kenyon Review
• Chinelo Okparanta on readings, writing happy and hopeful stories, and the problem with privilege. | The Rumpus
• “Read promiscuously. Imitate. Become your own voice. Sing.” Colum McCann’s advice for a young writer. | The Story Prize
• Disentangling themes “from the debris of neglect, poverty, and policy in the face of a disaster that was only partially natural:” On the post-earthquake Haitian novel. | The Critical Flame
• Visiting the aggressively twee cabins of digital visionary Eli Horowitz, former publisher of McSweeney’s and reconceptualizer of the novel. | BuzzFeed Books
• On the elder Vonnegut, who discovered how to control the weather and inspired his younger brother to write sci-fi. | Work in Progress
• “There is a big difference between being a writer and being an author. There’s also a potentially steep learning curve.” An interview with Angela Flournoy. | American Short Fiction
• Prepare to have your life changed 36 times over: Significant recommendations from various writers and editors. | Brooklyn Magazine
• “Sucking all the women out of history creates an artificial narrative and leaves the story of literature only half told.” Remembering the forgotten early female novelists. | The New Statesman
• Not sure why so many authors lost so much writing, but here is another undiscovered story (by Edith Wharton). | The Atlantic
• Thomas Pynchon’s earliest colonial ancestor wrote America’s first banned book, from which the modern reader “need only fear boredom.” | The Public Domain Review
• Harrowing visions of the California dream rotting in the scorching sun: Reading Gold Fame Citrus in drought-afflicted Los Angeles. | Full Stop
• A spontaneous language lurch, away from banality: Future-thinking authors Jennifer Egan and George Saunders discuss writing against nausea, narrative need, and world-creating language. | The New York Times Magazine
• Screaming vs. sighing at domestic unraveling: Comparing Days of Abandonment and Our Spoons Came From Woolworths. | BOMB Magazine
• Becoming “more present, weaker, and more vulnerable:” Alexandra Kleeman undergoes five days of bed rest, a pseudoscience still inflicted on pregnant women. | Harper’s Magazine

And on Literary Hub:

• Rick Moody is now a life coach. | Literary Hub
• Raymond Chandler’s biographer on the man who cared little for plot (but loved a good simile more than anything). | Literary Hub
• Against lousy Holocaust novels (and in praise of the unsung masterpiece we have to blame for them). | Literary Hub
• Elizabeth Gilbert on embracing the glorious mess: part two of her phone call with Paul Holdengraber. | Literary Hub
• Was Robert Walser the original art blogger? “Never before has an illustrator reproduced the flickering of a candle in so candle-like a manner, so flickery.” | Literary Hub
• Meet the judges for the 2016 PEN Literary Awards. | Literary Hub
• A brief history of religious toleration: on John Locke and the finer points of freedom to worship in the USA. | Literary Hub

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