LitHub Daily: December 9, 2015

• Bill McKibben’s five books to read if you care about the planet. | Literary Hub
• The PEN Literary Award longlists announcements continue: the The PEN Open Book Award and Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography longlists. | Literary Hub
• “Here are a few sad melodies from the choir that I hear.” Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. | The Nobel Prize
• The best (or at least the most interactive) of the best of the year lists thus far. | NPR
• Margaret Atwood is writing a graphic novel that will combine three of the Internet’s favorite things: owls, superheroes, and cats. | The New York Times
• “At its core, a lyric experience is an experience of possession.” An interview with poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips. | The Common
• In which astrology is regarded with the intellectual seriousness it deserves. | n+1
• Metaphor is even more pervasive than Orwell thought: On the experience-shaping potential of the omnipresent literary device. | JSTOR Daily
• “Relationships START. Relationships END. Everything HURTS. Everything feels AMAZING.” On reading Maggie Nelson and the feeling of stasis. | Hazlitt
• In a much nicer holiday tradition than threatening children with coal, Iceland’s jólabókaflóð (Christmas book flood) results in the production of most of the year’s books. | 2Seas Agency

Also on Literary Hub: A crash course in flash fiction · Great writing that fixates on the stars · Laura van den Berg’s story “Aftermath” from the new issue of Conjunctions