LitHub Daily: December 28, 2015

TODAY: In 1973, Gulag Archipelago, by novelist and former labor camp prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, is published in the West. 

• Our ten most popular stories of the year. | Literary Hub
• The unheralded monk who turned his small town into a center of publishing. | Literary Hub
• In a reality show begging to be made, This Old House’s Bob Vila is working to restore Hemingway’s Cuban home and the papers stored there. | NPR
• “It is language that pulls moments into their reality.” Claudia Rankine discusses the complicated nature of racism, loose anthropological exercises, and reading Adrienne Rich. | The Guardian
• A contest, with voting, was held to select this fan-designed cover for Infinite Jest’s 20^th anniversary. | IJ20
• “Literary prankster” Mario Bellatin has very seriously demanded that no one buy his most recent reissued novel. | The New Yorker
• Paul Kingsnorth determines his own intentions, looks the dark side of life directly in the eye, and draws from the vocabulary of the conquered. | The Rumpus
• “If she does not engage in critique, then the critic is thought to be naive, uninterested in politics, or, far worse, a humanist!” What is the contemporary utility of literary criticism? | Los Angeles Review of Books
• On the making, and continued necessity of, Saul Bellow. | The Daily Beast
• The best book of 2015 (about Marvin Gaye) and of other less timely years (1965, 2003, 1955, 2006, 1970). | Granta

Also on Literary Hub: Counting down the 50 biggest lit stories of the year: 25 – 16 · Your winter reading: from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

---