Lit Hub Daily: December 17, 2019

• For good, for bad, for weird, here are the 100 books that defined a decade. | Lit Hub Best of the Decade
• High comedy and misdemeanors: Liesl Schillinger on the Shakespearean drama at the heart of impeachment. | Lit Hub
• For Elena Ferrante, what distinguishes conventional male and female friendships? | Lit Hub
• River nomads, liveaboards, canal-dwellers and other people of the water: Laura Trethewey on the water-based communities fighting for survival. | Lit Hub Climate Change
• “In this system, who is untouchable? Who is disposable? Whose lives are we intent on preserving? Who goes unaccounted for?” A season of books takes stock of #MeToo. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Nick Ripatrazone speaks to teacher Joel Mayo about creating space in his classroom for poetry. | Lit Hub
• “It is the gift of being allowed to see ourselves in all our inconsistencies, to reckon with what it means to be an insider and outsider at the same moment.” Mira Jacob on reading Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Karen Russell’s Orange World, Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, and Zadie Smith’s Grand Union all feature among the Best Reviewed Short Story Collections of 2019. | Book Marks Best of 2019
• Celebrating the best crime and mystery debuts of 2019. | CrimeReads
• “Writing consumes writers. I think off and on about people I love, but I think about writing all the time.” Peter Schjeldahl on death, art, and writing. | The New Yorker
• Jesse McCarthy on Toni Morrison’s revolutionary, if lesser known nonfiction, which “gave us a mandate to see and speak clearly.” | The Nation
• #Merky Books, a new imprint of Penguin Random House, has already attracted many young authors from underrepresented backgrounds who are writing about race, class, identity, and more. | The Guardian
• “I wanted to create as many black British female protagonists as I could get away with.” Bernardine Evaristo on her Booker Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other. | Vanity Fair
• In the 1840s, pirating A Christmas Carol was a holiday tradition. | JSTOR
• How does 1970s literary “It” girl Eve Babitz feel about her renaissance? | Los Angeles Magazine

Also on Lit Hub: Why (and how, exactly) did early humans start cooking? • 100 books that defined the decade • Read from Saud Alsanousi’s latest novel Mama Hissa’s Mice (trans. Sawad Hussein).