TODAY: In 2016, Shirley Hazzard dies.
- We finish off our end-of-decade reckoning with a list of the best literary film adaptations of the 2010s. | Lit Hub Best of the Decade
- “Through imaginative projection and writerly craft, fiction let her to feel close to her dead mother.” Gillian Gill on Virginia Woolf’s multilayered relationship with her mother. | Lit Hub
- Katy Hershberger on Lurlene McDaniel—master of “dying teen” lit—and the allure of a problematic genre. | Lit Hub
- Sweltering heat, insufficient bathrooms, and malfunctioning rides: Disneyland on opening day was far from the Happiest Place on Earth. | Lit Hub History
- For all your holiday eating and gifting needs: the 10 best cookbooks of the year. | Lit Hub Food
- “The crux of the matter concerns who does, and who does not, have the privilege of engaging in what are often referred to as labors of love.” Stewart Sinclair on what it means (and takes) to have a career in writing. | Lit Hub
- On the trail with the vlogging teens of America, Mark Kenyon finds some surprising moments of connection. | Lit Hub
- Counting down the best crime novels of 2019. | CrimeReads
- Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, and Leslie Jamison’s Make It Scream Make It Burn all feature among the Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2019. | Book Marks Best of 2019
- Sarajevo has declared Nobel laureate Peter Handke “persona non grata” for his controversial views. The author will be legally barred from entering Bosnia through the capital. | Yahoo News
- “I hope it doesn’t lead to divorce”: Benjamin Myers on what it’s like to be on a literary prize shortlist with your spouse. | The Guardian
- “This is one of the great artistic achievements by an American—or really anyone—over the last century.” Jonathan Franzen pays tribute to Peanuts. | Library of America
- Textbooks have gotten 1,000 percent more expensive since the 1970s—do professors have an ethical obligation to take a stand against price gouging? | The New York Times
- Get ready for confetti (and probably fireworks): Baz Luhrmann is adapting The Master and Margarita for the big screen. | The Hub
- 2019 was a year full of memoirs that pushed the boundaries of the genre. | Chicago Tribune
- “Probably no one in this world is more susceptible to hyperreality than the exiled.” Amir Ahmadi Arian on the response to Iran’s internet blackout from the diaspora. | The Paris Review
Also on Lit Hub: W.E.B. Du Bois in Paris: The exhibition that shattered myths about Black America • The American universities that took in scholars from Nazi Europe • Read a story by Ivan Vladislavić from The Harvard Review.
