After more than sixty years, Antonio di Benedetto has had his book Zama finally translated into English. The novel, which kicks off in the 1790s, depicts a Spanish administrator named Don Diego de Zama, whose viceroy dispatches him to a town in the scrublands of Paraguay. In the latest New Yorker, Benjamin Kunkel gives his take.

“In the years before my book came out, I was writing frantically. I remember a week when I was working late at my job, late enough that the buses had stopped running and I had to take a cab home, and I still wrote into the night, trying to finish an essay I had promised an editor. Now I see that I was trying to race against time. I had believed, however irrationally, that there would be a moment beyond which my voice would be taken away from me and I would no longer be able to write.” On writing and tenacity.

Recommended Reading: Sophie Atkinson on Frank Ocean as Emersonian hero.

To mark the end of the Obama years, the crew at n+1 rounded up their best writing from his presidency. Head on over to read Aziz Rana, George Blaustein, and more.

Recommended Reading (Inauguration Day edition): “Haecceity” by Joshua Clover.

The recently-revived HTMLGiant previewed twelve indie lit books being published in 2017, and the list is a terrific supplement to our own Great 2017 Book Preview.

Silver Press is a new feminist publisher based in London. Forthcoming titles include Leonora Carrington’s The Debutante and Other Stories, which you can read about here, as well as the first U.K. edition of Audre Lorde’s essays and poetry.

Recommended Reading: “The Shallows” by Christopher R. Alonso.

Bruce Springsteen’s archive is headed to Monmouth University, which is located in his hometown: Long Branch, New Jersey.

People Who Eat Darkness author Richard Lloyd Parry’s forthcoming book on the Tōhoku earthquake and its aftermath, Ghosts of the Tsunami, will be released some time in late summer/early fall, and BBC Radio put together a 30-minute teaser to tide you over until then. You can also check out Parry’s moving yet unsettling piece for the London Review of Books.

New this week: Human Acts by Han Kang; Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh; Glaxo by Hernán Ronsino; The Gringo Champion by Aura Xilonen; and Transit by Rachel Cusk. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.

“Publishing is also an industry that selectively values a kind of swaggering authenticity that would never capitulate to demands for something so banal as being nice. But authenticity is too often a short hand for callous, aloof, or honest for the purpose of cruelty rather than truth-seeking.” Alana Massey writes about the “niceness” of publishing.