Lit Hub Daily: December 18, 2019

• “What I’m trying to preach, if I’m preaching anything, is the idea of doing the least harm possible.” Erin Berger visits the weird, wonderful worlds of Jeff VanderMeer. | Lit Hub
• James Tate Hill recommends a few of the best last-minute stocking stuffers around: audiobooks! | Lit Hub Audiobooks
• The story of Gershon Legman—the original sex-positive hipster intellectual—and his literary crusade to uncensor sex in America. | Lit Hub History
• When you find out someone won a prize plagiarizing your work: Laleh Khadivi on who owns a story. | Lit Hub
• “It was the first novel I read about working class women. It was political, poetic, and women were at its center.” Enza Gandolfo on seeing herself in the novels of Dorothy Hewitt. | Lit Hub
• When an author “loses control” of a character, is it the mysterious work of the unconscious, or the mechanized brain run amok? | Lit Hub
• Pain hidden in plain sight: Rick Moody on Bullet Park, John Cheever’s darkest work. | Lit Hub
• John le Carré’s Agent Running in the Field, Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, and Kate Atkinson’s Big Sky all feature among the Best Reviewed Mystery and Crime Books of 2019. | Book Marks Best of 2019
• Long awaited reckonings, savage appetites, and public crises: the CrimeReads staff selects the best true crime books of 2019. | CrimeReads
• “As a book publishing phenomenon, young adult literature entered the decade like a lion. . . But now, at decade’s end, YA seems to be eating itself alive.” The tumultuous decade in YA. | Slate
• Virginia Woolf’s biographers have disagreed over how much her experiences of childhood sexual abuse shaped her life. Her most recent biographer, Gillian Gill, argues that we can’t understand Woolf otherwise.  | TIME
• The British Museum is featuring the first major UK exhibit on the ancient city of Troy, which features literary gems including a papyrus manuscript of the Odyssey, John Dryden’s 1697 translation of The Aeneid, and more. | Fine Books Magazine
• Sex is now so common in literary fiction that it’s boring.  | Washington Post
• A close look at A Lost Lady, a “rarely remembered” work by Willa Cather, and its view of the American West. | Jezebel
• Translators, writers, critics, and booksellers recommend some excellent literature in translation you might have missed in 2019. | Words Without Borders
• How Kendall Jenner became an unlikely champion of alt-lit. | W Magazine

Also on Lit Hub: Poet Diane Glancy on transgression and writing the past • Lawand Kiki on being deported at the dawn of the Syrian War • Read from Amanda Michalopoulou’s newly-translated novel God’s Wife (trans. Patricia Felisa Barbeito).