Lit Hub Daily: December 11, 2019

• The ?ULTIMATE ?best books of 2019, or: The list of all lists (yes, we read them all and did math). | Lit Hub
• “I have lied, cajoled and manipulated to get time by the river.” Lara Maiklem goes mudlarking on the Thames. | Lit Hub History
• “I’ve been in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom many times. But it was only recently that I truly saw the light there.” Biographer Julie Dobrow on the poetic power of place. | Lit Hub Biography
• In a time of disaster, is it possible to write with optimism about nature? Tobias Carroll looks at books by Isabella Tree, Marc Hamer, and Tim Robinson. | Lit Hub Climate Change
• “In that circle, you did not simply say things. There had to be an intellectual filter, a politics via which you saw the world.” A brief history of Nairobi’s literary house parties. | Lit Hub
• The makings of Grace Paley: biographer Judith Arcana on the writer and activist’s life and career. | Lit Hub Biography
• “I want to read Austen. I want to read as many dead white writers as I can. But I must read them from this body.” Marcos Gonsalez on diversifying our readings of the canon. | Lit Hub
• Marlon James’ Black Leopard Red Wolf, Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein all feature among the Best Reviewed Sci-Fi & Fantasy of 2019 | Book Marks Best of 2019. | Book Marks
• “When people can publish whatever they want, they do.” Or, what the internet can learn from the printing press. | The Atlantic
• In the last decade, the digital marketplace has transformed the way we read. From audiobooks to Instapoetry, here are some of the major book trends of the 2010s. | BBC
• An interview with Andrei Pop, whose new book explores the “razor wit” of 19th-century Symbolist art and the outsize influence of Edgar Allan Poe. | The MIT Press Reader
• “Behind the walls you have an entire culture unfolding that goes unseen by the biggest part of society.” Tasos Theofilou—who spent nearly six years in prison—discusses what it’s like to write a book while incarcerated. | Mel Magazine
• An English professor at the University of Florida was reprimanded for checking out 728 books—more than twice the faculty check-out limit—from the school’s library. | Inside Higher Ed
• Neil Gaiman asked Twitter “what reminded them of warmth”; he used almost 1,000 responses to compose a poem for the launch of a UNHCR funding drive. | The Guardian
• A case for Little Women as “the original super-franchise.” | Vulture

Also on Lit Hub: On Kylie Minogue, cancer, and coming back to life • How cleanliness and beauty became intertwined in the 18th century • Read from Rosa Liksom’s newly-translated novel The Colonel’s Wife (trans. Lola Rogers).