Lit List: January 16, 2017

Good evening readers. Here's your round-up of today's must-read literary news, commentary and fiction.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Source: Nobel Foundation

Martin Luther King, Jr. Source: Nobel Foundation

  • Banned book quiz: can you guess which books weren't allowed into Guantánamo? Reprieve
  • On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, read the civil rights leader's powerful and instructive "Letter from Birmingham Jail" University of Pennsylvania
  • Antonio Di Benedetto's "brief, indelible" novel Zama is about an ethically wayward, existentially adrift lackey of the Spanish colonial empire The New Yorker
  • Bookworm-in-chief: "Not since Lincoln has there been a president as fundamentally shaped... by reading and writing as Barack Obama." The New York Times
  • On E. L. Konigsburg's The View from Saturday and finding the power of anger Hazlitt
  • In "Boomerang," by Lanre Akinsiku, a father and son toss around a boomerang that doesn't always return The Kenyon Review
  • The 2017 International Prize for Arabic Fiction announces its long list; nominees include Elias Khoury and Sinan Antoon Arab Lit
  • In a lost speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes Victor Hugo: "There is nothing more powerful...than an idea whose time has come." Ebony