LitHub Daily: December 19, 2016

TODAY: In 1910, French writer Jean Genet, immortalized in David Bowie’s “The Jean Genie,” is born. 

• Literary Hub’s 35 favorite books of the year. | Literary Hub
• The incomparable Siri Hustvedt on her love for the incomparable Louise Bourgeois. | Literary Hub
• Writers: What’s the one book you’re giving as a gift this year? | Literary Hub
• The art of a nation will outlast its governments: on Czesław Miłosz and creation as resistance. | Literary Hub
• The motorcycle guys like Trump: Hunter S. Thompson is the most recent addition to the ever-growing list of writers who anticipated the results of the election. | The Nation
• On Kafka’s “brief alternative-history as a travel hack” and life outside of his writing. | Prospect Magazine
• A writer can lead the public into that grief, and perhaps an awakening: Megan Mayhew Bergman on elegies for a changing world. | The Paris Review
• On the insults of Evelyn Waugh, who was “as wretched and ornery a human being as anyone could be who was not actually moved to suicide or murder.” |Weekly Standard
• From Carla Hayden’s appointment to Authors Guild v. Google, the ten biggest library-related stories of the year. | Publishers Weekly
• Jonathan Lethem, Will Chancellor, and other BOMB Magazine contributors on the books and music they most enjoyed from 2016. | BOMB Magazine
• The New York Public Library and Macmillan have announced a publishing partnership that will draw from the library’s archives to publish five to eight books a year. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: Ken Liu and Kate Elliott on writing powerful women in fantasy · Salena Godden on a world that’s majority minority · From Richard Fortey’s The Wood for the Trees

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