Lit Hub Daily: December 3, 2018

• Our favorite books of the year! (In which we, Lit Hub, attempt to show that 2018 wasn’t all bad.) | Lit Hub
• “Well, if you guys are just going to stare at me, I’m going to bed.” When the Beatles met their idol, Elvis, obviously. | Lit Hub
• If I miss a writing day, I have to pay Donald Trump $200. Tommy Schnurmacher has figured out how to defeat writerly procrastination. | Lit Hub
• “What is the opposite of a border?” Asiya Wadud on the infinite fault lines of contemporary life. | Lit Hub
• “I didn’t have a father.” Read a prose poem from Chelene Knight’s collection, Dear Current Occupant. | Lit Hub
• All this week we’ll be rounding up the Best Reviewed Books of 2018, beginning with a look at the year’s best reviewed Sci-Fi & Fantasy and Memoir & Biography. | Book Marks
• “To read the work by these men is to have an urgent encounter with a vital and thriving consciousness.” Ayana Mathis considers the state of American literature, and highlights 32 of the black men making it sing, from Jamel Brinkley to Jeffrey Renard Allen. | T Magazine
• Shocking news: the shortlist for the Bad Sex Awards is made up entirely of male writers—including Haruki Murakami and James Frey. If you want to squirm uncomfortably, here are some samples of their fine work. | The Guardian
• “In the twenty-first century, when our lives are full of distractions and sales pitches, I think poetry is a vitally rehumanizing force.” Jericho Brown interviews Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. | The Believer
• “Oh, how I wish he had just slipped into bed with Linda.” On worrying about Linda while reading Knausgaard’s My Struggle. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Pocket-sized, but still closer to being books than being cell phones (whew): on the introduction of the Extremely Twee dwarsligger into American literary culture. | The New Yorker
• Aram Mrjoian on writing about the Armenian diaspora. | Longreads
• “I want what others seem to want”: On the work and thought of René Girard. | New York Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub: Read “Love Is in the Sky“, a story from Andre Dubus’ collection The Cross Country Runner • On But That’s Another Story, Elizabeth Khuri Chandler talks to Will Schwalbe about the origin of Goodreads • Announcing the 21 Arts Writers Grant recipients