Lit Hub Weekly: December 5-9, 2022

TODAY: In 1907, Rudyard Kipling becomes the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature.

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