Best of the Week: October 13 – 16, 2015

• The President has “a conversation with somebody who [he] enjoy[s] and [is] interested in,” Marilynne Robinson. | NYRB
• In which Jonathan Franzen (profiled by Rachel Kushner) is put on the same level as Rihanna (profiled by Miranda July). | T Magazine
• “All of a parent’s feelings are dangerous, you motherfucker.” A short story by Ben Marcus. | The New Yorker
• Constructing the literary life of a great poet: an interview with the author of a new (and disavowed) biography of Ted Hughes. | NPR
• Congratulations to Marlon James, who has won this year’s Man Booker Prize for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. | The Man Booker Prize
• “I simply do not believe that literature is about inflicting pain, choosing elites, or providing utility.” Scott Esposito defends un-difficult literature. | Entropy
• Two literary investigations of political repression and sexuality, brought to you by Canada’s pioneer of speculative fiction (Margaret Atwood) and France’s “enfant terrible and dirty old man” (Michel Houellebecq). | The Atlantic
• “I really miss modernism.” Sarah Nicole Prickett on control, dualities, and the fiction of Henry Mathews, written like gossip. | Hazlitt
• Posing humanness as a question: craft, cynicism, and claims about language in Joy Williams’s short stories. | The Point
• On the sardonic gender performance of Eileen Myles, who writes “in the voice of the only girl in school who smokes cigarettes properly.” | Full Stop
• Searching for the story that matched the personal Jimmy to the public James: Reading James Baldwin’s letters to his brother. | The Boston Review
• Before #FerranteFever, there was Byromania: On the history (and grave desecrations) of celebrity writers. | Lapham’s Quarterly
• Jessa Crispin on the feeling of exile, parsing apart the Great Male Genius, and the loaded term “ladies.” | The Los Angeles Review of Books
• Susan Howe roams, remembers Wallace Stevens, ruminates on the letter R. | The Nation
• Joshua Cohen discusses his live-written serial novel, “an exercise in increasing ego by destroying ego” through “multicolor scrolling hate-speech.” | The Believer Logger
• Reconstructing the history of Alice James, who was “so much more than someone’s sister.” | The American Scholar

And on Literary Hub:

• Andrea Kleine on how the story of a murder from her childhood secretly became the topic for her novel. | Literary Hub
• Lincoln Michel reveals his animal side: books with beasts, a reading list. | Literary Hub
• The National Book Award shortlists have been announced; but who has the best cover? Allow us to judge these worthy books on looks alone. | NPR, Literary Hub
• The efficiently organized bedlam of the Frankfurt Bookfair begins today. Apparently Hitler will be there, and the German literary scene is analogous to a serial killer. | Literary Hub
• Paul Holdengraber and Claudia Rankine talk race, hope, and getting pulled from a security line at Heathrow, in episode 4 of A Phone Call From Paul. | Literary Hub
• Gavin McCrea on mining the correspondence of Marx and Engels, and finding the heroine of his novel. | Literary Hub
• Roland Glasser (translator) has a few beers and a big dinner with Fiston Mwanza Mujila (writer) somewhere in the 18th arrondissement; translation ensues, and Tram 83, a “jazz novel,” comes to life in English. | Literary Hub
• There once was a dildo in Nantucket—specifically, a 120-year-old “he’s-at-home” (plaster dildo) found in a chimney. Let us explain. | Literary Hub