Lit Hub Weekly: December 18 - 22, 2017

• She was their anchor, and they cast her aside: How Brigid Hughes, former editor of The Paris Review, was erased from her job. | Longreads
• These are airport novel numbers, not poetry ones: Thoughts on the massive popularity of Rupi Kaur and other “Instapoets.” | The New York Times
• “We are already surrounded by machines that demonstrate a complete lack of insight, we just call them corporations.” Ted Chiang on what will truly bring about the apocalypse (capitalism). | BuzzFeed
• “Perhaps that desire to be the hero of a quest is what motivates novelists to write the ‘lost book’ novels.” Why we love to read about rediscovered manuscripts. | Signature
• “Cat Person” author Kristen Roupenian is poised to make a ton of money, and we’re not sorry about it. | The Guardian
• “She reserved the right, and the ability, to be what she peculiarly was—not what she ought to be.” On the fiction of Mary McCarthy. | Commonweal
• “What about those who harm other people carelessly, thoughtlessly, drunkenly, ignorant of the consequences?” Michelle Dean on the word “predator” and the Powerful Literary Men who evade its definition. | The New York Times Magazine
• “The impending matter of Christmas finally split me open and I had to say it, on a call to a college friend across the country: I did not know where I would be spending it.” Kathleen Alcott on a lifetime of nontraditional Christmases. | The Guardian
• If you write a sexist article about Jane Austen, Jane Austen Twitter will come for you, and Jane Austen Twitter is mean (and witty). | The A.V. Club
• “It would be possible to write a parody of her novels called Desert Abortion – in a Car. Possible, but why? The best joke you could make wouldn’t touch her.” Patricia Lockwood on Joan Didion. | London Review of Books
• The Richard Avedon foundation has called on Spiegel & Grau to cease publication and distribution of Norma Stevens and Steven Aronson’s biography Avedon: Something Personal, claiming the book is filled with “countless inaccuracies.” | Hyperallergic
• “Eggnog’s decadence should not be considered sinful; indeed, it is one of those foods whose low-fat variations I believe to be a kind of crime.” Carmen Marie Machado sings the pleasures of eggnog. | The New Yorker
• “I believe Denis’s faith suffuses his writings, although I could be wrong about the ways the two correlate.” On Denis Johnson’s relationship to religion. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Snapshots, passports, drafts of Nobel speeches: a peek into the Harry Ransom Center’s newly-digitized Gabriel García Márquez archive. | The Paris Review
• Visiting Harriet Beecher Stowe’s home and Mark Twain’s neighboring proto-man cave. | Los Angeles Times

Also on Lit Hub: 

The best books of the best of 2017 lists: we did the math so you don’t have to (in this case, math = counting) • Lynn Steger Strong on the plotless novel as the art of the privileged • Am I smarter than a second grader? Evan Lavender-Smith debates his son on the merits of Wikipedia, and the etymology of “ladybird” • Emily Wilson on why she gave Homer a contemporary voice in her new translation of The Odyssey • Raina Sainath on the Palestinian children’s book that’s become a target for boycott and censorship • The literary biopic may be the worst kind of movie, but it’s still a pleasure to watch writers struggle on screen • Our favorite books of the year: Lit Hub staff picks for 2017 • The best book covers of 2017, as chosen by the book designers • Charles Dickens really didn’t like America (which led, in part, to the writing of A Christmas Carol) •  The most rejected books of all time (that eventually found a home)

This week on Book Marks:

“This book-shaped object made of cardboard and paper was never going to be a book exactly,” and more of the most scathing book reviews of 2017 •  The Guardian says that Mary Beard’s Women & Power: A Feminist Manifesto “deserves to take its place alongside Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics” • NPR book critic Annalisa Quinn on Kerouac, Sappho, and Olivia Laing • As 2017 draws to a close, we bring you the year’s best reviewed science fiction & fantasy, memoir & biography, science & technology, mystery & crime, poetry & graphic literature, and short story & essay collections • And finally, the best-reviewed fiction and nonfiction of 2017