LitHub Daily: Best of the Week: April 6–10, 2015

TODAY:  In 1931, Dorothy Parker stepped down as Drama Critic at The New Yorker, ending her “reign of terror.”

• The Audubon Society fires back at bird-lover and ‘dishonest intellectual,’ Jonathan Franzen. | Audubon Society
• “I wish I’d felt proud rather than grateful.” Saeed Jones on being a writer of color in a publishing world that is 89% white. | BuzzFeed
• The books that most influenced Gabriel Garcia Marquez, compiled. | Brainpickings
• The 2014 VIDA Count is out and many magazines fared better than previous years; it also includes the “larger literary landscape” and, for the first time, (pretty depressing) statistics on the representation of women of color. | VIDA
• Apparently, all of us are slouching towards a corruption of Yeats. | The Paris Review
• Kurt Vonnegut’s speech on his second most fortunate experience–“second only, perhaps, to my having been in Dresden when it was firebombed.” | Electric Literature
• In a crippling blow to France’s ego, New Jersey has acquired Derrida’s full library. | LA Times
• Behold the assistant economy: “the main artery into creative or elite work—highly pressurized, poorly recompensed, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes menial secretarial assistance.” (Or if you’re Susan Sontag’s assistant: share gossip, date son, move in.) | Dissent Magazine
• The incredible story behind Georges Perec’s formerly lost novel, complete with exclusive excerpt. | NYRB
• “The perplexing but wonderful thing about Morrison’s career is just how much her prominence was created not by the mainstream publishing world, but by Morrison herself, on her own terms, in spite of it.” The NYT Magazine’s profile of Toni Morrison. | New York Times Magazine
• Another lovely storyabout cruises: Lucy Knisley’s new cartoon memoir tells the classic tale of a young woman, her grandparents, the open sea, and the looming imminence of death. | NPR
• C. Boyle on Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” and how “Ray opened my eyes to a different mode of storytelling.” | The Atlantic
• Amelia Gray describes a charming date night in a teaser for her forthcoming short story collection, Gunshot: “Flesh is siphoned into a bowl and poured without discrimination into a free-standing grandfather clock that is set on fire and rolled into the street.” | FSG Originals
• Leslie Jamison on the lasting allure of Chris Kraus’s confessional “secretions.” | The New Yorker
• Some people truly only read Playboy for its brutally honest, unfiltered, and occasionally (quite) offensive interviews. | Hazlitt

And on Literary Hub:

• Lydia Davis taught herself Norwegian by reading one, very long book. | Literary Hub
• Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda confront the racial imaginary: “We are ourselves earthbound. And race is one of the things that binds us there.” | Literary Hub
• Both Cuba and America will attend the Seventh Summit of the Americas today; Chantel Acevedo shares scenes from a Cuban-American childhood. | Literary Hub

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