Lit Hub Weekly: December 5-9, 2022

• Drumroll, please: it’s our 38 favorite books of 2022! | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• “She writes her way to hope.” Jesmyn Ward on the optimistic work of Octavia Butler. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Leila Philip elucidates the sacred weirdness (and evolutionary puzzle) of the beaver. | Lit Hub Nature

• “It is an erudite despair.” Why (most) critics hated The Waste Land when it was published. | Lit Hub Poetry

• The best reviewed fiction and best reviewed nonfiction of the year (according to Book Marks). | Lit Hub

• The 20 best crime novels of 2022. | CrimeReads

• “As book lovers themselves, they know how important it is to make the publishing industry a better, more equitable, more sustainable place.” Kim Kelly reports on the HarperCollins strike. | Fast Company

• “There’s this unfortunate rhetorical shift that has happened in which anyone who talks about pandemic shit enters into an awful nagging-wife trope.” Lydia Kiesling on RSV and the way we talk about parenting in a pandemic. | The Cut

• “The ability to bend an inch at a time while seeming to stand up straight is a useful and gendered skill.” Isabel Kaplan on dating (and not dating) another writer. | The Guardian

• Max Lawton on touring America with Vladimir Sorokin: “On the way to the Brooklyn Book Festival panel Vladimir is speaking on, our Uber driver almost hits an old man.” | The Point

• “Literature is in peril because work, in America, has become totalitarian.” Patrick Nathan explores the numerous threats to American literary culture. | Entertainment, Weakly

• Adrienne Westenfeld talks to Dr. Christopher Hilliard about the game-changing obscenity trial over Lady Chatterley’s Lover. | Esquire

• In heartwarming news: A debut author tweeted about low book event turnout, and famous writers commiserated by sharing their own stories. | NPR

• Tobias Carroll recommends some standout new and forthcoming books in translation. | Words Without Borders

• Sally Rooney considers James Joyce and Jane Austen: “The Ulysses I present to you this evening might sound suspiciously like a novel about attractive young people in their twenties and thirties hanging around Dublin.” | The Paris Review

• Seven poets on their relationship with revision. | Iron Horse Review

• “The image of Wodehouse as some sort of manic literary beaver is one of the singular pleasures of reading his work.” Dan Brooks on the “brilliant hackwork” of P.G. Wodehouse. | Gawker

• David Canfield talks to Sarah Polley about her new adaptation of Women Talking. | Vanity Fair

• Aimee Levitt resists The Silver Palate Cookbook, whose “novel and aspirational” recipes changed home cooking. | Eater

• “Never has Coetzee enjoyed an uncomplicated relationship with language, least of all the English language.” Colin Marshall on J.M. Coetzee’s choice to publish his latest novel in Spanish. | The New Yorker

• Gretchen McCullogh considers the strange case of the shortened form of “usual.” | The Atlantic

Also on Lit Hub:

A late conversation with Stephen Sondheim about his favorite (and most overrated) books and movies • Jane Ciabattari talks about about the process of writing a historical mystery novel • What Frida Kahlo saw in the orchid • Cliff Bleszinski on finding success as a lifelong gaming nerd • David G. Myers on the virtues of humility • How language can be used to destroy and dominate • Retired professional cage fighter Jenny Liou on navigating the body after birth • Lenore Anderson on the politically motivated focus on drug convictions • Darcey Steinke on the long, complicated life of painter Agnes Martin • Shaun Bythell chronicles the occupational hazards of the second-hand book trade • Cherríe Moraga on writing about queer motherhood • For #ReadingAfrica Week, five writers and publishers discuss the continent’s diverse literary landscape • What running has taught me about writing (and vice versa) • How enduring anti-Semitism created false identities • On the literary and personal life of the prolific Anton Chekhov • On the metaphors of mathematical models • When a medical emergency reveals a long-hidden history of cancer