- “Every talent has its terms… Not everyone can be fruitful forever.” Philip Roth is still retired. | The New York Times Book Review
- “We are grownups: We can make up our own minds, one way or the other.” Margaret Atwood waded into the #MeToo discourse with a piece defending her decision to support Steven Galloway; many tweets ensued. | The Globe and Mail, Twitter
- “As far as I’m concerned, poetry is the best thing that exists in the universe.” Speaking with Kaveh Akbar, poet and founder of Divedapper. | NPR
- Leonora Carrington, Cristina Peri Rossi, and more: Cristina Rivera Garza curates a list of essential Spanish-language female authors. | Publishers Weekly
- Rachel Kushner on Denis Johnson, a writer “who was much more serious than a cult phenomenon might ever suggest.” | Bookforum
- “Men, women: Let’s assume the female writer needn’t have lived out the narrative to write it.” Jamie Quatro’s response to readers asking what her husband thinks of her novel. | The Paris Review
- Don’t give up! That’s all I’m trying to say: Mira Jacob talks to her past self. | Shondaland
- “The writing that holds real value for us very seldom comes into this world in a planned, tidy, rational way, as in a business plan, without disarray and confusion along the way.” On being a writer and making a living. | Slate
- “Angry women are messier. Their pain threatens to cause more collateral damage.” Leslie Jamison on female rage. | New York Times Magazine
- Margaret Atwood, Sarah Perry, Helen Dunmore, Naomi Alderman: Female writers dominated the literary bestseller lists in the UK last year. | The Guardian
- We might justifiably assume the Mad Hatter has mercury poisoning, but what other disorders might the text plausibly present? A neuroscientific reading of Alice in Wonderland. | Open Culture
- “Sidewalk lines do not want to be solved. They are intentional—cultivated, managed, bred like show dogs.” Jamie Lauren Keiles on the psychology of waiting in line, from George Orwell’s “The English People” to today’s sneakerheads. | Racked
- “Totalitarian regimes aim to stamp out the possibility of choice, but what aspiring autocrats do is promise to relieve one of the need to choose.” Masha Gessen on her youth, her emigration, and the burden and valor of choice. | New York Review of Books
- Two thieving nerds have stolen a first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone worth £40,000 from an English bookstore along with a first edition of The Hobbit and Terry Pratchett’s Colour of Magic. | The Bookseller
Mary O’Connell on the largesse of her old teacher, Denis Johnson • A love letter to Borges: Read Susan Sontag’s homage to a master • Who gets to write about gentrification? Naima Coster writes from the center, not the margins • John Jeremiah Sullivan on craft: There’s no such thing as wasted writing • The conversation I’ve been dreading: Ijeoma Oluo talks with her mom about race • 10 iconic Brooklyn books that every New Yorker should read • What is the language of American empire? Elaine Castillo on keeping untranslated words in her fiction • Finding yourself through food: On Alice B. Toklas and her radical cookbook • After the memoir: Molly Caro May is a different person now from the one on the page • Rebecca Solnit on life in the dark timeline and the 20 million missing people that could save America • The literature of bad sex: Hermione Hoby considers the contemporary canon • It was the worst of times: John Freeman on the reality TV president and our year in irreality · Aminatta Forna wonders what happens if you have an inauguration and nobody comes • Alison Hart on how to write a #MeToo story • “There are all sorts of caves, including ice caves, sea caves, volcanic caves, and glacier caves.” From Keats “Cave of Quietude” to the Tuckaleechee Caverns of Townsend, Tennessee, Susan Harlan goes deep • On Philip K. Dick and Black Mirror: Does speculative fiction really work on TV?
The Best of Book Marks:
A 1966 review of Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag’s “astonishingly American” nonfiction debut • BOMB Magazine calls The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Denis Johnson’s posthumously published short story collection, “a final gift from the master” • This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: EW’s David Canfield on Zora Neale Hurston and the critic as curator • The Crying of Lot 49 as Thomas Pynchon’s patriotic lamentation • On what would have been her ninety-seventh birthday, we looked back on the dark delights of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley • Denis Johnson, dying democracies, drug cartels, and more all feature among our Best Reviewed Books of the Week
