Best of the Week: October 3 – 7, 2016

TODAY: In 1892, Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva is born. 

• “For Ferrante, an author’s absence merely restored the basic conditions of literature to the public: it enabled the writer to write and the reader to read.” Dayna Tortorici on the unmasking of Elena Ferrante. | n+1
• On its 160th anniversary, reflecting on Madame Bovary, which “bequeathed a legacy of female Quixotes.” | The Guardian
• “The president be like/we lost a young      boy today.” A poem by Morgan Parker. | The New York Times
• Junot Díaz on the importance of the humanities, what science fiction can accomplish, and creating Yunior. | Vox
• “Boring is something I definitely want to avoid.” A profile of Nell Zink, “middle-aged enfant terrible.” | Vulture
• “Fiction that I love shows me how profound world-making through sentences can be—a true and complex miracle.” An interview with Maggie Nelson. | Fiction Advocate
• “Few explications of the Trump phenomenon mine these deeper connections between the Trump insurgency and his positive-thinking faith.” Chris Lehman creates and explores a Donald Trump syllabus. | The Nation
• “In places far from queer privilege, independent bookstores often offer queer people their only safe spaces.” On Garth Greenwell’s and Garrard Conley’s “Gay Invasion of North Carolina.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• My First Real Affair: On Angela Carter’s time in Japan. | The Times Literary Supplement
• What we talk about when we talk about PTSD: Phil Klay on Donald Trump’s dismissal of veterans’ mental health. | Esquire
• Leigh Stein on workshopping, LiveJournal, and how her parents reacted to her memoir. | Vela Magazine
• The 2016 National Book Award finalists have been announced, including Chris Bachelder, Karan Mahajan, and Jacqueline Woodson in fiction; Ibram X. Kendi, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Heather Ann Thompson in nonfiction; and Rita Dove, Jay Hopler, and Solmas Sharif in poetry. | National Book Foundation
• “Nothing other than seeing a ghost has been as instrumental in my thinking about the materiality of the shared imagination and its importance in poetry.” Dorothea Lasky on encounters with spirits and poetics. | JSTOR Daily
• Will the Nobel Prize in Literature go to “pasta fetishist” Haruki Murakami, “Norwegian cigarette smoker” Karl Ove Knausgaard, or someone else? | The New Republic
• This is a fairy tale about a bookshop: Yiyun Li on her first encounter with a bookstore. | Granta

And on Literary Hub:

• Leave Elena Ferrante alone: David L. Ulin on the baffling impulse to unmask a beloved writer.
• Naomi Extra on Love Jones and searching for black desire onscreen.
• Ann Cleeves, master of the village noir.
• “Where the hell do you start with something as vast as a memoir?” iO Tillet Wright on how to tell the story of a life.
• How my grandfather went from the Pulitzer Prize to complete obscurity.
• So who was Jack the Ripper? Otto Penzler on the most famous serial killer of them all.
• Witches, Wangs, glam: 16 books you should read this October.
• We’re destroying our planet and all the wild things on it: Jane Alexander on extinction, pollution, and fracking.
• On the most photographed person of his time: Fredrick Douglass.
• Nell Zink on the ten things you need to know to be a novelist. (Plus excerpts from her new novel, Nicotine, and her reissued Private Novelist.)
• Is Joyce Carol Oates trolling us? On gaffes, cats, and JCO’s twitter feed.
• Why every American should read The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Gabrielle Bellot on radical difference in the age of Trump.
• Julia Alvarez remembers her friend, the writer Gloria Naylor.
• On envy, the internet, and Diana Ross: Jami Attenberg and Maria Semple in conversation.
• A first look at the cover for Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, and his conversation with John Freeman about “the first post-Brexit novel.”
• War in translation: Lina Mounzer on the urgency of giving voice to the women of Syria.
• How bad writing destroyed the world: on the origin of Ayn Rand’s thinking, and a Manchurian economist named Greenspan.
• In which the great Jan Morris plays old records for Paul Holdengraber and whistles along.
• Junot Diaz: “On my way to the novel, I fell in love with the short story.”
• How the Yugoslav wars shaped a generation of writers: Lidija Dimkovska on the other lost generation.
• The literature of creepy clowns: if they’re coming, you might as well be prepared…
• On research, google maps, and the importance of landscape: Tracy Chevalier and Paulette Jiles in conversation.

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