TODAY: In 1895, Joseph Conrad‘s first novel, Almayer’s Folly, is published in London.
- Granta has announced their Best of Young American Novelists of 2017: “twenty-one outstanding writers who capture the preoccupations of modern America.” | Granta
- Why is the unconscious so loathe to speak to us? Cormac McCarthy on dreams and the evolution of language. | Nautilus
- “Poems are visible right now, which is terribly ironic, because you rather wish it weren’t so necessary.” On the renewed importance of poetry (and a primer of resistance poems). | The New York Times
- I have become a language warrior: An interview with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- “Do you want to get tattoos?” Amanda Petrusich profiles poet Morgan Parker (and accompanies her to a Brooklyn tattoo parlor). | The New Yorker
- “Sometimes explanations are what we do when we can’t actually envision the future.” Jeff VanderMeer and Cory Doctorow in conversation. | Electric Literature
- Margaret Atwood made a feminist out of me: On the eve of its new Hulu adaptation, 12 writers reflect on The Handmaid’s Tale. | Elle
- James Patterson will write a true crime book about Aaron Hernandez, to be published in early 2018. | CBS
- “I’m stunned by how vividly, and in how few pages, it captures the potency of girlhood and the way those years can reverberate through an entire life.” Julie Buntin on Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? | Library of America
- How Renée Watson’s I, Too Art Collective is working to turn Langston Hughes’ home, which went back on the market in 2016, back into a community space. | NYLON
- Her life was made of multiple escapes: On Leonora Carrington’s story and pursuit of freedom. | New Statesman
- Bret Anthony Johnston has won the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. | The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award
- John F. Kennedy’s diary from his 1945 stint as a journalist will be put up for auction. | NPR
- “He had had a two-year head start on being American, and occasionally he’d make a flourish of demonstrating it.” Jenny Xie’s “Lucky Frank,” the first place winner of Joyland’s 2017 Open Border Fiction Prize. | Joyland
- Johnny Depp has clarified how many millions of dollars he spent firing Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes from a cannon. | Vulture
Speaking with the 13-year-old Pakistani girl on a mission to read the world · On F. Scott Fitzgerald and the psychic cost of selling out · Competing visions of the global novel in the work of Haruki Murakami and Roberto Bolaño · In the age of Trump, reclaiming the golem as a symbol of Jewish resistance · Jill Lepore on one of the greatest first ladies of all time, Eleanor Roosevelt · Translating this broken world: How Valeria Luiselli and Mark Lyons tell refugees’ stories · He can’t jail us all: Danut Hinc on communist Poland and Donald Trump · On violence, brotherhood, and life in the North Country · Turning to phantom prehistoric culture for answers to modern political problems: On the far right obsession with Indo-Europeans · The books that inspired beloved authors, from David Foster Wallace to Zadie Smith, to write
This week on Book Marks:
A unique kind of hurt: on James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time · Horrific, deep, and devastating: David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon · Che Guevara: a founder of magical realism (at least, according to Christopher Hitchens) · George Orwell’s 1940 review of Mein Kampf · Jeff VanderMeer on Lidia Yunavitch’s sci-fi reimagining of the Joan of Arc story · A revisionist take on Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree · Book Marks Top 5: the best reviewed books of the week
