LitHub Daily: November 17, 2016

• The winners of the National Book Award are, respectively, John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell for young people’s literature; Daniel Borzutsky for poetry; Ibram X. Kendi for non-fiction; Colson Whitehead for fiction.
• Maurice Ruffin on mourning an America that was never really there. | Literary Hub
• Ten contemporary novels by and about Muslims you should read. | Literary Hub
• Poet Mary Jo Bang has a hard time finding Dante in Dan Brown’s big-screen Inferno. | Literary Hub
• Elena Marcu: fascism comes to America (and everywhere else). | Literary Hub
• Actually, Thoreau was really funny. | Literary Hub
• “You are death-facing: That’s just a fact.” An interview with Zadie Smith. | Slate
• Turning on the deep dualities that characterize all human existence: On the writing of Viet Thanh Nguyen. | Fiction Advocate
• On criticism’s “renewed vitality” and “disturbing new register of anxiety and self-consciousness,” and the work of James Wood, A.O. Scott, and Mark Greif. | The Nation
• How our NBA is like that other one: Yahdon Israel speaks with Lisa Lucas, president of the National Book Foundation. | espnW
• “The impulse toward hybridity is, in part, an impulse toward inclusiveness.” Thalia Field and Laurie Sheck in conversation. | Tin House
• “But every story ends with / The word prison.” A poem by Christopher Soto. | Hyperallergic

Also on Literary Hub: Robert Bresson: in conversation with a master · I met my husband at a Holocaust convention · Read from Nick Cave’s The Sick Bag Song