Lit Hub Daily: December 6, 2022

• Drumroll, please: it’s our 38 favorite books of 2022! | Lit Hub Reading Lists

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• “Vertigo is the most overrated piece of shit.” A late conversation with Stephen Sondheim about his favorite (and most overrated) books and movies. | Lit Hub

• Julia Sirmons considers the thrill of watching a writer develop before our eyes in Annie Ernaux’s The Super Years. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• What Frida Kahlo saw in the orchid: “Kahlo reminds us that in gestation, plant cultivation, and the larger human condition, we often veer from the mechanical to the sexual, from the scientific to the sentimental.” | Lit Hub Nature

• Cliff Bleszinski reflects on finding happiness (and eventual career success) as a lifelong gaming nerd. | Lit Hub

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• Jane Smiley talks to Jane Ciabattari about the process of writing a historical mystery novel. | Lit Hub In Conversation

• Rachel Vorona Cote considers the “indiscreet” biographies of Lytton Strachey. | Lapham’s Quarterly

• “There’s this unfortunate rhetorical shift that has happened in which anyone who talks about pandemic shit enters into an awful nagging-wife trope.” Lydia Kiesling on RSV and the way we talk about parenting in a pandemic. | The Cut

• “Poetry, for him, is the language the heart speaks not when it reaches for some externalized divinity but when it seeks to understand itself.” Eliza Griswold on Pádraig Ó Tuama’s contemporary spirituality. | The New Yorker

• Can you match the literary rejection to the writer who received it? | Dorothy Parker’s Ashes

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• Rye White reports from the HarperCollins picket line. | n+1

• “There is relief in reading her poetry, and luxuriating in the stretched seconds of her fecund verse.” Remembering Bernadette Mayer. | London Review of Books

• “The ability to bend an inch at a time while seeming to stand up straight is a useful and gendered skill.” Isabel Kaplan on dating (and not dating) another writer. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: David G. Myers on the virtues of humility • A literary narrative of blank space • Read from Jane Smiley’s latest novel, A Dangerous Business