TODAY: In 1928, Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes is born.
- “New Yorkers choose to gather under the banner that says ‘New York’—which is so elastic it really means nothing at all—and that is exactly what I love about this place.” In the wake of last week’s attack, Zadie Smith on New York City. | NYRB
- Taste’s fall fiction issue includes pieces by Helen Phillips, Esmé Weijun Wang, and more. | Taste
- “The essay’s roots are in literature, and literature at its best. . . invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.” Jonathan Franzen on the essay form, making sense of Donald Trump, and. . . birds. | The Guardian
- “We have always known that moving backward was not an option.” Brit Bennett on racism, the past year, and reclaiming her time from Trump. | Vogue
- We are 19 or 22 or 24, and in the great city, we are living in the great moment, the very forefront of now: Luc Sante on New York City in the 1970s. | Noisey
- I wanted there to be a sense that maybe there is something wrong with this guy: An interview with Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the Odyssey. | The New York Times
- Joe Hill on the privileges and pitfalls of writing in the shadow of his famous dad, Stephen King. | GQ
- “He has really mastered the popular voice and speaking to enormous public concerns. It’s a kind of public-speaker role for poetry that has gone unoccupied pretty much since Allen Ginsberg died.” A profile of Kevin Young, who has been making poetry matter. | Esquire
- “Our spaces were just a place he went to feel famous and cruise for sex, and then, when asked about it, to mock us.” Alexander Chee on Kevin Spacey. | them.
- “If only I could attend French Woods, the place where Natasha Lyonne and Zooey Deschanel had spent their summers. . . Instead, I found myself at the Clara Barton Camp for girls with diabetes.” Maris Kreizman on outperforming her chronic disease. | Longreads
- “The main difference is that I hate people now.” Katha Pollitt reflects on the year since Donald Trump was elected. | The New York Review of Books
- “Vance is in our schools, our libraries. He is at our graduations and in our newspaper. He’s like the monster from It Follows.” Elizabeth Catte on J. D. Vance fatigue and the case against Hillbilly Elegy. | Boston Review
- How Tumblr and Instagram decontextualize complex quotes from writers like bell hooks and Maggie Nelson, leaving only “a general idea . . . that can be hashtagged.” | The Awl
- Helen Oyeyemi, Emma Donoghue, and more: 8 collections of speculative fiction featuring queer characters. | Autostraddle
- “Ceasing to exist will mean that I have done what I was built to do: save the country from The Man Who Must Not Be President.” A short story by David Burr Gerrard, told from the perspective of the algorithm that guided the Clinton campaign. | Joyland
“Write what you know” is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard: Advice from Kazuo Ishiguro · I am too old/to learn the names/of the new killers: Two poems by Leonard Cohen · 10 books that capture Los Angeles in all its sublime, beautiful darkness · Anne Sexton responds to her worst-ever review · It reads like pop culture poetry: On The Autobiography of Gucci Mane · From midcentury poetry to reality TV, how “confession” became a dirty word · Being a bitch is spectacular: Myriam Gurba on meanness · Finding solace in bookstores in the face of cancer: On the pleasure of being surrounded by literature · 11 writers on the weirdness of promoting a book in the first year of Trump · What can be learned from an archive of longing? On writing (and not sending) letters
This week on Book Marks:
Facts are lonely things: Anne Tyler’s 1988 review of Don DeLillo’s Libra · The ruthlessness and paranoia of Joseph Stalin · From 1917, Virginia Woolf on Leo Tolstoy and the “superb sincerity” of the Russian writers · The “charged radiance” of Helen Dunmore’s final novel, Birdcage Walk · A piece of careless hackwor: the 1885 reviews of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · Book critic John Freeman on Zadie Smith, The House on Mango Street, and gentrification in NYC · Very little more than a kind of terribly serious and determinedly outspoken soap-opera: Anne Sexton’s worst-ever review · Astronauts, the Chicago Cubs, and more: the best-reviewed books of the week
