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

• 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

Lit List: January 13, 2017

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

Ottessa Moshfegh. Source: Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 4.0

• Ottessa Moshfegh's writing dwells on inner and outer ugliness Bookforum 
• How Elena Ferrante's Frantumaglia unites "two cultures in women’s writing that are not supposed to mix" Dissent 
• Let yourself be consumed by this fascinating history of human and animal cannibalism Slate
• The novel of the Obama era: chasing authenticity, haunted by "the specter of phoniness" and the myth of meritocracy New York Magazine 
• Matías Celedón's The Subsidiary is the tale of an ordinary office where a power outage goes terribly wrong, written entirely in office stamps 3% 
• How a poet on a desolate island fell in love with a statue Guernica
• In Teddy Wayne's Loner, a male Harvard student transforms "from part-time creep to full-blown psychopath" The Los Angeles Review of Books 

Lit List: January 11, 2017

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

Frantz Fanon. Source: Pacha J. Willka

• Obama's farewell speech called on "we the people" to remember that yes, we still can LSP
• Mother tongues and "mother-in-law language": Talking to in-laws can be complicated, but in some languages a whole host of ordinary words becomes taboo in their presence The New York Times
• Scratch, an anthology about writers and money that doesn't always do much more than scratch the surface Slate 
• Roxane Gay interviews an iconic "difficult woman": Madonna Harper's Bazaar
• Intellectual magazines and the CIA's Cold War puppeteering of American culture The Los Angeles Review of Books
• Frantz Fanon is remembered as an advocate for resistance by any means necessary, but rarely as a scholar, a psychiatrist, a doctor, a humanist The London Review of Books
• Riddle by Jericho Brown: "We do not know the history of our selves on this planet because we do not have to know what we believe we own." The Georgia Review 
• Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, author of The Crown Ain't Worth Much, on poetry as witnessing, on reckoning with grief and investing in joy Hazlitt
• Fiction by Mary Helene Bertino: "Is there a patron saint for everything?... Turnips? Socks you can’t find? And outlet malls?" Electric Literature

Lit List: January 9, 2017

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

• "It’s very hard to review one’s past without cheating a little": an interview with Simone de Beauvoir, who was born of Janaury 9th, 1908 The Paris Review
• The Rastafari are more than Jamaica's tourist-friendly mascots: the anti-colonial, radical roots of the long-persecuted Rastafari movement The New York Review of Books
• For modern couple Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, love was essential; monogamy was contingent The New Yorker
• In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir deals brilliantly with ambiguity Slate
• How to write about Africa: "always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title." Granta
• On the eve of Obama's farewell speech, remembering George Washington's last address to the nation NPR

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (detail). Source: Wikimedia Commons

Lit List: January 6, 2017

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

• What to read in 2017: A workout plan for your brain. LSP 
• The true story of the Florida librarians who used electronic trickery to try to keep neglected books on the shelves Electric Literature 
• Rumi is a beloved poet and mystic, but few of his American readers know him as a scholar and poet of Islam. New Yorker 
• "Nectar," by Rumena Bužarovska: a woman deflates her gynecologist husband's artistic prentension. Words Without Borders 
• Geoff Dyer on John Berger, his life, and his influences, from Barthes and Sontag to Benjamin and Spinoza Bookforum 
• Novelist Randa Jarrar: "My writing is drag, comedy, cinema, a weed flower, glittery bras...a sheesha packed with apple-flavored tobacco." The Los Angeles Review of Books 
• The silencing of Charlotte Brontë's anger Public Books 
• In 2017, we need art that looks to the future, not more retrospectives on the hidden gems of the past, says Jerry Saltz Vulture

Artistic rendering of Rumi by Molavi

Lit List: January 4, 2017

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

• Barack Obama's thousands of speeches paint a picture of America that America has not lived up to N+1 
• Sci-fi in China goes as far back as Jules Verne, and now those works are coming to American readers. Asia Times 
• In Mexican modernist art, a "fine and decadent abuse" of European aesthetics and a mockery of death Hyperallergic 
• When adaptations get too clever for their own good: "What I want from a Sherlock Holmes adaptation is Holmes and Watson solving crimes together." Lithub
• Roxane Gay talks with NPR's Audie Cornish about Difficult Women and difficult men NPR 
• From acid to Adderall, how each generation gets the drugs it deserves Aeon 
• An old woman extends a strange welcome in a poem by Jacob Shores-Argüello Poetry Foundation 
• Samantha Schweblin's novel "Fever Dream" instills a sense of mysterious horror The New Yorker 
• How Puccini has been appropriated by Donald Trump, as if to make what is old new again MTV

Barack Obama. Credit: Pete Souza

Lit List: January 2, 2017

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

• How Ayelet Waldman changed her life for the better by micro-dosing LSD Bookforum
• John Berger (1926-2017), a beloved critic credited with popularizing art history and theory, snuck Marxism into his analyses The Los Angeles Review of Books
• Yiyun Li describes the years-long genesis of her short story "On the Street Where You Live" The New Yorker
• Annette Gordon on the rhetoric of white racial solidarity at the heart of the American Revolution The New York Review of Books
• When George Plimpton and Ernest Hemingway watched an execution in Cuba, and why the CIA helped fund the Paris Review Guernica 
• Books to get you through 2017: a selection of "good books for bad times." Mask Magazine
   

John Berger. Credit: Ji-Elle

Lit List: Wednesday, December 28, 2016

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

• Marlene Dietrich, avid reader and annotator The New Yorker

• Jason Stanley's 2015 How Propaganda Works is a timely warning about "mangled facts; false claims; and reductive, Manichaean storytelling." The New York Times

• Rebecca Solnit looks onward to January 20th and back to America's unfinished civil wars Harper's

• Pondering "the fragility of civil liberties" at the sites of Japanese-American internment camps Buzzfeed

• Sneakers have always been political shoes The Atlantic

• Sarah Nicole Prickett on growing up evangelical in London, Ontario, and losing her faith in Midland, Michigan The Towner

• Richard Adams, interviewed: the author of the children's classic Watership Down passed away on December 27th, 2016 The Guardian

• Novelist Ahmed Naji on being part of the "contradictory, vagabond, incongruous mosaic...of the greater Middle East" Arab Lit

• "Last time we met we named all our favorite authors": poetry by Hsia Yu Asymptote

Rebecca Solnit. Credit: Charles Kremenak

Lit List: Friday, December 23, 2016

Ocean Vuong. credit: Wikimedia Commons

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

• A few little-known Hanukkah stories The New Yorker
• Ta-Nehisi Coates on the importance of Kwanzaa The Atlantic
• Christmas is not the only thing that's commodified Lithub
• Ocean Vuong and Alexander Chee discuss how to balance dreams of literary fame and buying their moms houses Bon Magazine
• Branko Milanovic, the author of "Global Inequality," explains the chaos of 2016 The New Republic
• Eileen Myles' poem "Merry Christmas, Dr. Title," about a place she doesn't go anymore BOMB Magazine
• Lewis Lapham re-politicizes A Christmas Carol Lapham's Quarterly

Lit List: Wednesday December 21, 2016

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

• On Margot Lee Shetterly's "Hidden Figures" and why science never exists in a vacuum NPR
• The Return of Münchausen: a wanderer stumbles upon a reclusive artist. The Paris Review
• "This is what happens to the bodies of the women you know": the reality of the 1 in 5 pregnancies that end in miscarriage Medium
• Why Barack Obama reads: the outgoing president believes reading is crucial to developing an empathetic, complex worldview. The San Francisco Chronicle
• "America should be afraid of itself": The enduring relevance of Scream MTV
• For speaking truth to power, the Nepali magazine Himal Southasian has printed its last issue...for now. The New Yorker
• In Greece, readers are looking across the Mediterranean with a renewed interest in Arabic literature Arab Lit
• Facebook sees you when you're sleeping, it knows when you're awake The New York Review of Books

Margot Lee Shetterly. Credit: Wikimedia Commons