Best of the Week: September 21 – 25, 2015

TODAY: In 1946, William Strunk Jr., one half of every grammarian’s favorite team, dies.

• Orhan Pamuk has written his best book yet, post-Nobel Prize. | The Independent
• Let the atrocious images haunt us: Judith Butler, Susan Sontag, and photography of the European refugee crisis. | JSTOR Daily
• On “simply surrendering to elegant, limpid prose” of Lily Tuck’s very untraditional autobiography, The Double Life of Lillian. | The Millions
• John Freeman (an editor at Literary Hub) is launching an “illustrious new literary journal;” the first issue features writing from Haruki Murakami, Lydia Davis, Louise Erdrich, and more. | Vogue
• Deb Olin Unferth on the short stories of Joy Williams, nemesis of Alice Munro and descendant of Flannery O’Connor. | Bookforum
• “We are not the only people who have noticed this mainly white room.” On the lack of diversity at literary readings and the environment it fosters. | The Los Angeles Review of Books
• There will be no future opportunities to Oyster and chill: the “Netflix of books” is shutting down, and much of the team is moving to Google Play Books. | Oyster, Re/code
• From the original eggsplainer to Genius, an annotated history of annotations. | The New Republic
• Kit Williams’s The Hare offered a textual treasure hunt with a real-life prize, causing readers to conjure wildly invented, false meanings in ways that hadn’t been seen again until Game of Thrones. | Hazlitt
• T.S. Eliot’s relationship to the public and poetry of sexual desolation have inspired the musings of countless scholars, among them Monica Lewinsky and Barack Obama. | Poetry Foundation
• “This is what obsession looks like: I am Dante following my Virgil.” Deliriously decoding the poetry of Frank Stanford. | Oxford American
• A list of books in which the narrators, who are definitely not millennials, realize the story isn’t all about them. | NYPL Biblio File
• In the piece we have all been waiting for, Nell Zink describes birding with “Clickbait;” clues to his identity include his mini car, his trouncing of feminism, and his ability to get a headline but constant awareness of the pain of rejection. | The Cut
• In other news regarding inflated male egos and questionable sex writing, Morrissey’s novel has received interesting reviews. | The Guardian
• A catalog of hypocrisy: indexing The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture. | n+1

And on Literary Hub:

• On Jay DeFeo’s “captivation at the sight of the bone from a roast leg of lamb as it sat in her soup pot” and the power of repetition and multiplicity in art. | Literary Hub
• Honor Moore untangles a life-long obsession with her hair, which by all accounts, is beautiful. | Literary Hub
• Margaret Atwood gives the Genius annotation treatment to an excerpt from her forthcoming novel, The Heart Goes Last. | Literary Hub
• Literary Hub launches a podcast, A Phone Call From Paul. Episode one, Paul Holdengraber calls Neil Gaiman on the telephone. | Literary Hub
• A possibly true ghost story from David Mitchell, once upon a time in Japan. | Literary Hub
• “We ate scrambled eggs in front of an ineffectual fan.” Eileen Myles in conversation with Ben Lerner. | Literary Hub
• What to read when you’re trapped in your home by a new baby. | Literary Hub
• Rachel Eliza Griffiths remembers how it felt as a young black woman writer to be seen: “When you are seen you can no longer disappear.” | Literary Hub

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