Lit Hub Daily: December 21, 2022

• The manuscript thief was unmasked (and arrested), someone plagiarized from obscure novel The Great Gatsby, and we all sifted through Joan Didion’s things: And so continues our tour of the biggest literary stories of the year. | Lit Hub

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• ICYMI: Book Marks rounds up the year’s award-winning novels, from the Pulitzer to the Bram Stoker Award. | Lit Hub

• Hervé Tullet reflects on a career of creating unconventional children’s literature: “I had long reproached myself for not taking pleasure in making my books.” | Lit Hub

• “Young Pynchon didn’t even merit mention on the magazine’s cover.” In his latest dive into the archives, Nick Ripatrazone looks at big names in little magazines. | Lit Hub

• “He’s interested in the horror of every living creature’s situation.” Joy Williams on Cormac McCarthy. | Harper’s

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• Hilton Als considers Robin Coste Lewis’s new book of photographs and verse, “a book about how the dead do not stay dead.” | The New Yorker

• “All oral examination scenes have built-in drama.” Hollis Robbins reflects on the enduring resonance of Phillis Wheatley. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• Looking for a book about the failings of Effective Altrusim? Try Dickens’ Hard Times. | The New Republic 

• “There are things an exhibition catalog can do that a visitor experience cannot.” Sarah Rose Sharp on the power of a visual glossary. | Hyperallergic

• Mark Athitakis deems 2022 the year of the fragmented identity novel. | Los Angeles Times

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• “Pregnant people’s bodies are being turned into crime sites.” Heather O’Neill on re-reading Annie Ernaux’s Happening, post-Roe. | Catapult

Also on Lit Hub: Sumana Roy on the useless in the poetic • How WWII pacifists laid the foundation for the modern antiwar movement • Three poems by Robert Walser (tr. Daniele Pantano)