Lit Hub Daily: December 11, 2018

• From plagiarizing poets to the Well-Read Black Girl empire: the countdown continues of this year’s top literary stories. | Lit Hub
• “Relieved of my ego, I was astonished by how abundant and interesting the world became.” Stacey D’Erasmo on the freedom of writing anonymously. | Lit Hub
• The short story collection hidden in a box: on discovering the lost manuscripts of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. | Lit Hub
• The Lit Hub Questionnaire for a few of 2018’s under-the-radar writers: Sabrina Orah Mark, Lisa Locasio, and more answer our five questions. | Lit Hub
• “Now, hardly a debutante, I am making my debut.” Because it’s never too late to start (or finally finish) that novel. | Lit Hub
• From The Catcher in the Rye to Stuart Little: the author of The Dakota Winters, Tom Barbash, shares his five favorite books about New York. | Book Marks
• The CrimeReads editors attempt the exceedingly difficult exercise of selecting the very best crime and mystery releases of 2018. | CrimeReads
• The CEO of one of Brazil’s biggest publishing houses penned an open letter to struggling booksellers. | Publishing Perspectives
• Legendary spy novelist John le Carré’s next novel will be set in Brexit-era London. | The Guardian
• “It’s hard to imagine a less auspicious moment to try to bring the character back to life”: on the contested legacy of Atticus Finch. | The New Yorker
• “My memories of these meals carried me, unwaveringly, from month to wretched month.” Bryan Washington on the year in broth. | Hazlitt
• “On the left there’s a timidity around language, like when mainstream newspapers embrace terms such as ‘alt-right’ and ‘white nationalists.’” Read an interview with Jabari Asim. | Guernica
• “As radical as empathy and imagination can be, these qualities exist in the mind. But there is also a poetic language of embodied experience.” Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith on our new political poets. | The New York Times Book Review
• “That, my dear fellow, is Dorcas Dene, the famous lady detective.” In which Olivia Rutigliano traces the Victorian trend of female-driven detective novels. | Lapham’s Quarterly

Also on Lit Hub: Brandon Hobson on discovering Cherokee myths in his grandfather’s notebook • Literary Disco‘s best books we read in 2018 • Read from Anna Burns’ Booker Prize-winning novel, Milkman