Midweek Links: Literary Links from around the Web (January 18th)

All the best literary links that are fit to, well, link

Lena Dunham talks to Mary Karr about dealing with Trump voters, teaching, and getting asked about David Foster Wallace too often: “Everybody in America owes me a dollar who read Infinite Jest. I guess having grown up in the period of time that I grew up, I grew up with this. I think women of your generation, they have better underwear. They have better eyebrows. They have better bra technology. Better politics. I think they like themselves a little better. I think the men of your generation are a little better, a little more sophisticated. They’re not going to call a woman a whore because she has a job that she goes out at night in a car. You have freed women to talk about the shitty sex of hookup culture and how hard it is to have relationships with other women at your age, through your twenties when you get out of school, those pressures. As I say, I think you’ve made the all-American menstrual hut.” — Mary Karr

Here are the finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award

Michiko Kakutani writes on President Obama’s voracious reading while in office — “During his eight years in the White House — in a noisy era of information overload, extreme partisanship and knee-jerk reactions — books were a sustaining source of ideas and inspiration, and gave him a renewed appreciation for the complexities and ambiguities of the human condition.”

(Read this for all of President Obama’s book recs)

Ottessa Moshfegh discusses her depression, writing, and the Scottish singer Lena Zavaroni with The Atlantic’s Joe Fassler: “My nature is not to feel thrilled at being alive. I’m 35 now, but up until my 30s, I really just wanted off the planet. I also have been somebody who felt pretty helpless about my own eating disorder. Nobody came to my rescue, and it was really depressing. I think eating disorders are a way of trying to change who you are because you feel powerless to change the world.”

How an independent bookseller obsesses over his customer interactions: Samuel Gaffe Goldstein writes on the perils of customer service — “My human weakness revealed itself recently when a customer asked for a Copenhagen travel guide and I handed her a Lonely Planet Belgium. To confuse Belgium with Copenhagen takes real talent”

For some inauguration weekend escapism try these 10 books about wild women from The Guardian

Tom McAllister on why podcasts may be the future of book reviews — “Book reviews have traditionally been written in an ostensibly objective voice, while podcasts provide a more personalized, idiosyncratic response to a given book.”