Best of the Week: October 24 – 28, 2016

TODAY: In 1924, Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, dies.

• The saga of Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize continues: A member of the Swedish Academy has called the newly crowned laureate, who has barely acknowledged the award, “impolite and arrogant.” | The New York Times
• From oral poetic traditions to family soap operas, a look at early Korean novels. | BLARB
• How Swann’s Way, “Proust’s slow meditation on the compelling this-ness of home, family, and desire,” embodies the essence of Southern literature. | Bacon on the Bookshelf
• A reading list of 10 international women writers, from Shahrnush Parsipur to Clarice Lispector. | Signature Reads
• “The genre of crime allows you to say almost anything and explore emotions that—particularly as a woman—are not acceptable to explore.” A report from London’s first crime writing festival, organized by all-female writing collective Killer Women. | Broadly
• A heritage architecture and monument has to be alive: A preview of the soon-to-reopen al-Qarawiyyin Library, the world’s oldest continuously operating library. | Hyperallergic
• The Man Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded to Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, a “searing satire on race relations in contemporary America.” | The Man Booker Prizes
• From Abraham Lincoln to Elizabeth Kolbert, the 10 books that shaped President Obama. | Wired
• Writers’ coping strategies often end up constituting something like style: Kea Wilson interviews Tony Tulathimutte. | Playboy
• Reading Baldwin, of course, changed everything: Hilton Als and Jacqueline Goldsby in conversation. | The Paris Review
• On Sarah Waters’ abortion scenes, “at once warnings about the threat illicit abortions pose to women’s bodies and reminders of the long history of reading women’s sexual acts and appetites as dangerous or corrosive.” | n+1
• Visiting the archives of Angela Carter, “a lifelong believer in writing as a public, material art form.” | The London Review of Books
• Who are these girls? Why are there so many of them? Emily St. John Mandel offers a take on the titling trend, this time with graphs. | FiveThirtyEight
• “It is cruel to rig our system to create these extremes, and thus to cast fellow citizens into the two sewers that border the national road.” Mark Greif on the necessity of ending super-wealth as well as super-poverty. | Verso Books
• They set up the 14+ exactly one year after Trump was elected to his third term: Etgar Keret imagines a dystopian future for America. | BuzzFeed Reader

And on Literary Hub:

• In praise of the great Thom Jones: remembering the boisterous, blue-collar fiction of an American master; plus “The Pugilist at Rest,” a story by Thom Jones.
• Could Saraband, a two-person press from Glasgow, win one of the biggest prizes in literature? On the rise of the small press on the Man Booker shortlist.
• On first seeing your novel on the big screen: M.L. Stedman watches The Light Between Oceans.
• John Simpson, editor of dictionaries: STOP STEREOTYPING LEXICOGRAPHERS!
• How I built my own Game of Thrones iron throne: Lauren Harms reveals the secrets of the book designer.
• Edward Albee, big in Bulgaria: on Eastern Europe’s love/hate relationship with a great American playwright.
• On the opening day of the World Series, three stories from the history of American baseball: on Babe Ruth‘s bat, Jackie Robinson‘s jersey, and the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League handbook.
• Ha Jin on the long reach of the Chinese government.
• Police violence and the American caste system: Colette Shade on Arundhati Roy and Black Lives Matter.
• A reader’s journey through transition: Joseph Schreiber’s search for self in a lifetime of books.
• We all make mistakes: On the publisher who rejected Jane Austen.
• Did Imbolo Mbue actually write the Great American Novel?
• How Donald Trump modeled his life on cinematic loser Charles Foster Kane.
• Rabih Alameddine in conversation with John Freeman: “My existence is uncomfortable to people.”
• Sara Novic on accessibility, appropriation, and who has the right to speak for the Deaf community.
• Marilynne Robinson laments America’s vanishing culture of generosity.
• Junot Diaz on telling the stories of the dead, and the joys of teaching the young.
• Are you an Anne Shirley or an Emily Starr? In praise of L. M. Montgomery’s lesser-loved heroine.
• Emily Witt on love, sex, and orgasmic meditation.
• Erroll Morris on the time he filmed Donald Trump missing the point, part two.
• Toni Morrison talks about Kim, Kanye, and the time she met Jeff Bezos.
• Writing infertility: Belle Boggs in conversation with Monica Youn.
• Phil Klay on the citizen-veteran gap and modes of storytelling.
• There are 1,462 possible plots for your book.
• A new documentary highlights the ongoing relevance of Isaac Babel.

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