GrubWrites

Best of the Web 11/27/17

Thrice a month, we feature our favorite literary links. As ever, we promise: You’ll ruminate. You'll ponder. You won’t get any writing done.

From The Guardian, "The Best Books of 2017 Part One" and "Part Two," in which contemporary authors enthuse about the year's literary highlights, especially Sebastian Barry's Days Without End. Grubbie Alex Marzano-Lesnevich's The Fact of a Body is SJ Watson's favorite of the year, and Girl On a Train bestselling author Paula Hawkins is crushing on both The Fact of a Body and grubbie Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere.

From Wear Your Voice, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Editor-in-Chief of The Offing, responds to Francine Prose's recent essay with "Mirroring Society, White Anxiety Reigns Supreme Within the Literary World."

"As QTPOC and white women editors, writers, and visual artists, we know that even as novels by writers of color have begun to flourish in publication houses, it’s still possible for a Black trans woman’s creative work to be stolen and bought by Netflix; for a white man to essentially re-write a famed Black novelist’s fiction and be celebrated for it; for it to be more likely that trans women of color will experience higher rates of criminalization and murder than be celebrated as creative workers."

From the Alaska Quarterly Review, Eliese Colette Goldbach's "White Horse."

Grub staffers have not been able to stop talking about this essay all week. (Content Note: addresses rape in an explicit and sustained way.)

From Poets and Writers, a collection of their weekly writing prompts, "The Time Is Now."

"The Time Is Now offers a weekly writing prompt (we’ll post a poetry prompt on Tuesdays, a fiction prompt on Wednesdays, and a creative nonfiction prompt on Thursdays) to help you stay committed to your writing practice throughout the year. We also offer a selection of books on writing—both the newly published and the classics—that we recommend you check out for inspiration, plus advice and insight on the writing process from the authors profiled in Poets & Writers Magazine."

From Quartsy, the English-speaking world prepares to meet the work of Jin Yong: "The 'Lord of the Rings' of Chinese Literature is Finally Being Translated Into English."

"The world imagined by Chinese writer Jin Yong is one which celebrates loyalty, courage, and the triumph of the individual over a corrupt and authoritarian state—carried out by no less than heroes who fly through trees and deliver deadly blows to their enemies with a single finger."