Best of the Week: September 14 – 18, 2015

TODAY: In 1911, William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies and giver of Piggy nightmares, is born.

• The sycophantic portrait of an intellectual bully: on James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the world’s first and greatest biography. | Wall Street Journal
• #TwitterFiction is now a thing, allowing authors both formal experimentation and engagement with teens. | The Atlantic
• Justin Taylor parses Sam Lipsyte’s sentences in a self-proclaimed craft talk that nobody asked for. | BOMB Magazine
• Joyce Carol Oates discusses her upbringing, which explains the darkness in and sheer abundance of her writing. | NPR
• Rhetorical agility, rigorous introspection, and rueful knowledge: reading Negroland and Between the World and Me. | Bookforum
• On Saul Bellow’s love/hate relationship with the academy and its (ruinous) impact on his fiction. | The New Republic
• In which Hanya Yanagihara explains how the traumatically tragic A Little Life is like a fairy tale. | Bookanista
• Move over, Dan Humphrey: Edith Wharton was the original Gossip Girl. | Flavorwire
• “It’s not like I’m trying to make a point on postmodern fragmented existence.” A profile of Valeria Luiselli, who is smarter than all of us. | Broadly
• In which Go Set a Watchman is actually analyzed. | Public Books
• Edward St. Aubyn’s A Clue to the Exit and existential literature’s contemplation of its own demise. | Full Stop
• “It’s probably not a surprise that so misanthropic and self-absorbed a character as Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov would have held me in thrall.” Revisiting Crime and Punishment as a non-teen. | Critical Mass
• “I was asked… to make my book seem more relatable to audiences, as if none of those audiences had people like me in them.” Mira Jacob on being asked to speak, and then ignored, as a writer of color. | BuzzFeed Books
• “What real person trapped in this novel wouldn’t become a drug addict?” Christian Lorentzen offers a dissenting opinion on the much-praised A Little Life. | London Review of Books
• In which parallels are drawn between the generous nobility of dolphins and a writer’s coffee breaks. | The Sewanee Review
• Forty-four writers and public intellectuals have written an open letter to Chinese president Xi Jinping urging him to “release the Chinese writers and journalists who are languishing in jail for the crime of expressing their opinions.”| PEN America

And on Literary Hub:

• Janis Cooke Newman on the need for a writing tribe, emerging writers who support and celebrate each other (and enjoy some wine together too). | Literary Hub
• Growing up with George Carlin, personal mythology, and learning to laugh at your pain. | Literary Hub
• Mary Duffy on how tweets, “those 140-character epigrams, are ripe for comparison with the work of David Markson.” | Literary Hub
• Belinda McKeon on the vast distances a writer needs to travel to get from beginning to end.  | Literary Hub
• Alexander Chee on literary social media in the age of Ferrante | Literary Hub
• Embedded with the super-rich: a photo essay from inside the world’s tax havens.  | Literary Hub

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