LitHub Daily: December 27, 2016

YESTERDAY: In 1894, poet and novelist Jean Toomer is born.

• Literary Hub counts down the 50 biggest literary stories of 2016 (50 to 31) | Literary Hub
• So you’ve published a novel… What next? New Year’s resolutions from seven debut novelists. | Literary Hub
• Lessons in the power of mass protest. | Literary Hub
• Both poetry and democracy derive their power from their ability to create a unified whole out of disparate parts: Reexamining Walt Whitman’s claim that the United States “are essentially the greatest poem.” | The Atlantic
• “I am sure that the dead are alive, but I don’t know what they are doing precisely.” An interview with Alice Notely. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Utopia is Europe turned upside down: Reflecting on Thomas More’s Utopia on the 500th anniversary of its publication. | Hyperallergic
• Photographs of the “private spaces” of 10 notable people who died in 2016, including Jim Harrison, Elie Wiesel, and Edward Albee. | The New York Times Magazine
• Did I understand what it meant to renounce my mother tongue? Yiyun Li on her decision to write in English. | The New Yorker
• From Memoirs of a Polar Bear to Ema, the Captive, five great works of literature in translation published this year. | NPR
• You realize that you’ve entered, or better, been sucked into, Fuckhead’s world: From the Paris Review archives, Jeffrey Eugenides on Denis Johnson’s “Car-Crash While Hitchhiking.” | The Paris Review

Also on Lit Hub: An interview with the Astropoets · Reading about women being alone · From Paul Bloom’s latest Against Empathy.

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