Lit Hub Daily: December 29, 2017

• Our favorite Literary Hub stories of 2017, from reading Mrs Dalloway to the unique genius of Serena Williams. | Literary Hub
• What was it like to live the literary life in 1997? Curtis Sittenfeld and Oscar Villalon look back 20 years, in conversation with Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan. | Literary Hub
• Jack London seems to possess an intuition of the dog life, and the dog heart: A 1903 review of The Call of the Wild. | Book Marks
• “If you could see every bird in the world, you’d see the whole world.” Jonathan Franzen (who else?) on the importance of birds. | National Geographic
• Beyond Bambi: On animal studies by German-Jewish authors, from Heinrich Heine to Franz Kafka. | The New Yorker
• “A novelist could entertain, she could illuminate, but she must never swerve from the world as it is experienced.” On the work of Mary McCarthy. | The Nation
• The Kindle is just one screen in a culture overrun with them: Why evolving technologies haven’t (and won’t) fundamentally change books. | The New Republic
• Lolita, Our Town, and more: Legendary graphic designer Chip Kidd shares his favorite books. | Vulture

Also on Literary Hub: The top literary stories of 2017, 20 to 11 · Spending New year’s eve on a train: A night with no midnight · Read from Robert Coover’s novel, The Brunist Days of Wrath