Lit Hub Daily: December 20, 2022

TODAY: In 1968, John Steinbeck dies at 66.   

• Literary non-hotties, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Depop, and that time a bunch of cookbooks sank into the sea: And so begins our annual tradition of counting down the biggest literary stories of the year. | Lit Hub

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• “What, I wondered, would Pound have thought of Donald Trump?” Tom Rea on reading Ezra Pound in our neofascist age. | Lit Hub Politics

• “It’s his 19th book… Here’s hoping it’s his last.” Yep, it’s the most scathing book reviews of 2022 (according to Book Marks). | Lit Hub

• Merrill the poet, Bloom the reader: Heather Cass White unearths the literary fan mail between Harold Bloom and James Merrill. | Lit Hub

• “The portrait’s power was unquestionable.” Kate Dwyer does a deep dive on the origins of the mysterious $110,000 Joan Didion portrait. | The New York Times

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• Ann Kjellberg reports on the closing of Bookforum. | Book Post

• “Eliot understood that the only way to keep literary tradition alive was not for contemporary writers to worship it or ignore it but to continually reshape and extend it.” Ryan Ruby on 100 years of “The Waste Land.” | Poetry

• For no special reason, Dan Kois talks to Emily St. John Mandel about what she’s been up to this year. | Slate

• Take a look at the most borrowed books from New York City’s public libraries this year. | Gothamist

• Ilana Masad recommends six classics actually worth your time. | The Atlantic

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Also on Lit Hub: Winterland author Rae Meadows talks about immersing herself in the world of Soviet gymnastics • The intersections of poetry and medicine • How airports liberate (and constrain) us

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