LitHub Daily: December 23, 2016

TODAY: In 1963, The Goldfinch author Donna Tartt is born. 

• Jeanette Winterson on the time she made a Christmas custard with Kathy Acker. | Literary Hub
• On Kurt Vonnegut’s wonderful, beautiful secular marvels. | Literary Hub
• Being alone over the holidays can be fantastic, and it can be sad. Either way, you’re going to need some books to read. Here are 15. | Literary Hub
• From Etel Adnan to Jordan Zandi, the best poetry collections of 2016. | The New York Times
• “Science fiction has not just helped define and shape the course of literature but reached well beyond fictional realms to influence our perspectives on culture, science, and technology.” Ann and Jeff VanderMeer on the history and evolution of science fiction. | Electric Literature
• “I mean that art is a miraculous creation: that we can take terrible consequences in life and understand it and make art of it.” An interview with Maxine Hong Kingston. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• J.K. “Always Working on a Novel” Rowling is currently writing two new books. | Slate
• “I wanted to write about fracture, but I also wanted to write a different type of immigrant story: one that I hadn’t seen before.” A profile of Jade Chang. | The Guardian
• A “picture of determined citizen resistance sticking a wrench in the gears of modern progress:” On a new biography of Jane Jacobs. | n+1
• Colin Barrett on Mao II, “an anguishedly witty book on the bottomless, self-aggrandizing torture of being a writer.” | Granta

Also on Lit Hub: How Charles Dickens helped invent a holiday · A desperate Arctic Christmas · An excerpt from Zadie Smith’s Swing Time.

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