Best of the Week: September 6 – 9, 2016

TODAY: In 1940, Virginia Woolf’s London house at 37 Mecklenburgh Square is destroyed by The Blitz. 

• Mary Roach on bizarre military task groups, footnotes, and her lack of tolerance for PowerPoints. | Hazlitt
• Danielle McLaughlin on Wide Sargasso Sea’s “exquisite, deadly prose” and its influence on her writing. | The Paris Review
• Linguist John McWhorter on the literal meaning of literally, the drift of language, and the difference between Elizabethan and modern English. | NPR
• “On any given day, digitally and in print, readers of the New York Times can expect more book coverage.” Pamela Paul on transitions in the New York Times’ book coverage. | Publishers Weekly
• I am no poet; I cannot forget: Harold Bloom on Alvin Feinman, a “poet of astonishing individuation.” | The Critical Flame
• “There is a feeling of inevitability in that line of station wagons, advancing like a column of tanks, and DeLillo’s words provide subversive ammunition against them.” On White Noise and college move-in day. | The New Yorker
• How does one tell the story of a revolution? On four books that track the fallout of popular uprisings in Egypt and Syria. | The Nation
• Why the man behind “Born to Run” is also “a born memoirist“: Dave Kamp profiles Bruce Springsteen ahead of his 500-page memoir. | Vanity Fair
• In which Marlon James shares six things he learned about Brad Pitt, a regular guy/plant murderer. | T Magazine
• I’d Die for You, a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s complete unpublished stories, will be released next spring. | The Guardian
• On Adrienne Rich, “the unofficial poet laureate of 20th-century American feminism.” | The American Scholar
• “It’s getting to work, and saying it out loud, and reminding every person I meet on a bus and every Uber driver and every girlfriend who isn’t ‘a reader’ that they, too, will like these things that I work every day in support of.” An interview with National Book Foundation director Lisa Lucas. | The New York Times Magazine
• “There is something really valuable about a kind of unbridled ridicule that also drills down to the things that people seem to really stick to and be proud of and asks them whether they really believe in those things and whether they really should feel so proud of them. “ An interview with Mark Greif. | VICE
• “Dancing-master, he said from a mouth stained with meat, why do you not try your hand at reforming the wild young man?” A short story by Alexandra Kleeman. | BuzzFeed Reader
• The print was small, but the ambition was titanic: On the Morgan Library’s new exhibition celebrating Charlotte Brontë’s 200th birthday. | The New York Times
• There are many more stories out there: Tope Folarin on Western expectations and “accessible” narratives in African fiction. | Los Angeles Review of Books

And on Literary Hub:

• Mario Vargas Llosa: how global entertainment killed culture.
• What do your reading habits reveal about your personality? A literary questionnaire.
• Spoiler alerts: on misguided spoiler panic and why we should all calm down.
• Remembering the poet Max Ritvo: Death is actually very funny: a last conversation with Ritvo and Justin Boening • “The End,” a poem by the late poet • Where Is Max Ritvo’s heaven? On the death of a young poet and the limits of imagination.
• Tracy K. Smith on race, love, hate, and Lucille Clifton; part two of the poet’s conversation with Paul Holdengraber.
• Peter Ho Davies: Hitler’s dog, and other problems of historical fiction.
• Kia Wilson on how being a bookseller made her a better writer.
• How individualism conquered American fiction: Jonathon Sturgeon on the “imperial self” and the rejection of social responsibility.
• Lauren Collins really didn’t want to write a memoir: Stephanie LaCava talks to the author of When in French: Love in a Second Language.
• When news of a suicide comes during memoir class: practicing compassion in a room where difficult things are shared.
• Emily Books asks… what is women’s writing? Emily Gould and Ruth Curry on their upcoming symposium.
• Two hundred years after the embargo Helen Garner finally reviews Pride and Prejudice (spoilers contained within).
• A son seeks to avenge his father’s death: Eliot Weinberger‘s parable of 8th-century Ireland.
• 32 imaginary tennis matches Paul Auster’s godson would very much like to see.
• Miyazaki and more: Gabrielle Bellot on the rich literary DNA of Japanese anime.

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