Best of the Week: October 11 – 14, 2016

TODAY: In 1922, T. S. Eliot founds The Criterion magazine, in which he first publishes his poem The Waste Land. 

• Beyond the bifurcation between “motherly-looking” and “chillingly horrifying.” Joyce Carol Oates on Shirley Jackson’s life and work. | New York Review of Books
• “Literally every major newspaper in the world wanted to speak with me about Beyoncé… I thought: are books really that unimportant to you?” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on “****Flawless” and feminism. | De Volkskrant
• One poet attempts to solve the timeless question: How should a poet make money? | The Point
• The Elena Ferrante takes keep rolling in: Her translator Ann Goldstein and Jeanette Winterson have weighed in; America and Europe were both angry, but for different reasons; her new nonfiction book seems “to fly in the face of her declaration” that writing should exist independently from the media. | Vulture, The Guardian, The New York Times
• “Walking down the city streets, young women get harassed in ways that tell them that this is not their world, their city, their street.” Rebecca Solnit on the manscape that is New York City. | The New Yorker
• On top of being a bestselling author, he has an unpaid career as a meme: A profile of Jonathan Safran Foer. | BuzzFeed
• Presenting a familiar drama, in which a clever man outs a female writer (but not the one you think). | Public Books
• The 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” | The Nobel Prize
• “So, how to do it? Choose very few details, and choose ones that have trapdoors built into them in order to make the world of the story feel both familiar and unreliable.” Alexandra Kleeman interviews Colin Winnette. | Playboy
• Arcane fun with Christian Lorentzen: How Nobel Prize winners are nominated, narrowed down, and selected. | Vulture
• In which Rob Spillman compares book touring to being a roadie for his daughter’s band, reflects on meeting legendary booksellers, shares excitement about the literary world. | Poets & Writers
• A lot of people had a lot of thoughts about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. | The New York Times, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, VICE
• Tessa Hadley, Helen Garner, and Hilton Als discuss glamour, body fascism, and writing in the face of no. | Electric Literature
• Market forces at work: On the fiction of George Saunders. | The Guardian
• Marketing categories can be destiny: Michelle Dean on the Brat Pack and literature that prefigures them. | The Nation

And on Literary Hub:

• The man who invented bookselling as we know it.
•  Not just Trump: Jonathan Rabb on the deep progressive roots of the American South.
• Ten books that don’t exist, but should: unfinished, lost, withdrawn, and otherwise tempting us…
• From Alice Munro to Jenny Zhang, ten short stories for the International Day of the Girl.
• Growing up under the Russians: Durs Grünbein remembers a childhood under occupation.
• The top five contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature (according to gamblers): Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on his college years · Our love-hate relationship with Haruki Murakami · Adonis on the failure of the Arab Spring · Don DeLillo on the life of a book…
• By us, for us: Garnette Cadogan digs into the phenomenon of New Orleans bounce.
• Wu-Tang’s RZA on the mysterious land of Shaolin: Staten Island.
• Bookselling in the 21st Century: on the difficulty of recommending books.
• So who exactly is Bob Dylan, newly crowned Nobel laureate? Lisa Levy goes deep on the poet vs. songwriter vs. showman debate…
• Jonathan Lethem on the lost conversations of Ross MacDonald, a 20th-century literary master.
• Barney Rosset on the publishing gamble that changed America, and the legal battle for Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
• Lean in, swipe right: Bridget Read on Tinder, Emily Witt’s Future Sex, and the uncertain politics of singledom.
• A thing that breaks before it bends: on Donika Kelly’s black girl poetry.
• From Orwell to Kapuscinski to Trump: When does egoism become narcissism?
• Human memory really is unreliable: an excerpt from The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei, translated by Canaan Morse.
• Yes, Bob Dylan really did win the Nobel Prize: Rosie Schaap on Dylan’s most poetic album · On his literary influences, from William Blake to Jack Kerouac · Patrick Ryan on his collegiate Dylan obsession · How Dylan just wanted to be a soul singer · Noah Berlatsky thinks Chuck Berry might as well have won…
• The banality of Donald Trump: on Hannah Arendt’s birthday, examining her relevance to our political moment.
• Brit Bennett on place, isolation, and what it means to be good.
• When virality goes wrong: Chris Holm on the inspiration behind his new Michael Hendricks novel.
• Small data is the new big data: two designers explain why personal documentary trumps the quantified self.

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