LitHub Daily: December 16, 2015

• Doctors who tell stories: on Oliver Sacks and narrative medicine. | Literary Hub
• Our staff shelf: Literary Hub’s best books of 2015. | Literary Hub
• Elif Batuman on loving A Little Life, a combination of “gratuitously inflicted” tribulations and “Sex and the City-style lifestyle porn” that somehow works. | The New Yorker
• Karl Ove Knausgaard on his life and work after his “midlife-crisis novel.” | The Paris Review
• What, exactly, did Herman Melville mean when he wrote, “already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul?” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• 75 notable works of literature in translation, from Naja Marie Aidt to Moikom Zeqo. | World Literature Today
• “The game gradually turned into a debate about the rules of playing it.” A short story by Valeria Luiselli. | Guernica
• Laila Lalami recommends eight books about Muslim life to “complicate perceptions and deepen the conversation.” | The Washington Post
• “I want to reinscribe my body into my reading and writing practices.” On the erotic in poetry. | Jacket2
• Discovering Kathy Acker’s sexless twin, Claude Cahun: An excerpt from Jessa Crispin’s The Dead Ladies Project. | The Offing

Also on Literary Hub: An interview with Hilton Als, on what is means to be hopeful, despite the world · When an indie publisher opens an indie bookstore: Will Evans tells us why Deep Vellum is expanding into the bookstore world · More from the best of the year: an excerpt from Sally Mann’s National Book Award-shortlisted memoir, Hold Still