Lit Hub Daily: December 5, 2023

• The 38 best books (new and old) that Lit Hub staffers read in 2023. | Lit Hub

• Why there’s more to eyeliner than meets the eye. | Lit Hub

• A magnificent relic: Samantha Harvey muses on the slow death of the International Space Station. | Lit Hub Space!

• 21 new books out today, just in time for gifting season. | The Hub

• On the Velvet Underground’s first album: “This music was so savagely indifferent to my feelings. It didn’t care if I liked it or not.” | Lit Hub Music

• “Rage, too, is a reflex, I want to say, like grief, like God.” Christian Wiman on conversion and repentance. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Four Palestinian poets write in a time of catastrophe. | LARB

• A new award, the Inside Literary Prize, will be judged by incarcerated people. | The New York Times

• Casey Cep details how the poet Christian Wiman kept his faith and pursued his art while battling a rare form of cancer over the past two decades and surviving against all odds. | The New Yorker

• “We are homesick not only for the places we left, but for the people we were when we left them.” Timothy C. Baker reflects on the way the books of our childhoods shape our understanding of the world. | The MIT Press Reader

• As Israeli airstrikes continue in Gaza, Palestinians mourn the loss of their libraries, which “locals recall as refuges and rare beacons of culture.” | The Washington Post

Also on Lit Hub: Kate Christensen on allowing characters to tell their own stories • A poem by Olatunde Osinaike • Read a story from Louise Kennedy’s new collection, The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac