Lit Hub Daily: December 2, 2019

• What was the first book you fell in love with? The Center for Fiction’s 2019 First Novel Prize authors weigh in. | Lit Hub
• “Disagree with my argument, beliefs, and my politics, but hands off my syntax!” Lore Segal’s love letter to editors. | Lit Hub
• “Among Larry’s many strengths as a writer, maybe foremost, was a kind of negative capability: He never flinched.” Jonathan Miles remembers Larry Brown. | Lit Hub
• “It’s as much a homecoming as it is a pilgrimage.” On walking through the house where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women. | Lit Hub
• What makes a poem Jewish? A roundtable on engaging with Judaism through poetry. | Lit Hub
• All the crime books you need to read this December, as selected by the CrimeReads staff. | CrimeReads
• The Book Marks Questionnaire: Melissa Broder on Marguerite Duras, obsessive dreamers, and childless MILFs. | Book Marks
• A year of literary listening: AudioFile‘s best nonfiction audiobooks of 2019. | Book Marks
• More and more libraries across the country are recognizing late fees as “a form of social inequity,” and eliminating them entirely. | NPR
• “Move over, Jane Eyre!” Margaret Atwood on the life lessons of “Little Lulu.” | The New Yorker
• Richard Power recommends 26 books on trees. | PBS
• The best books of 2019, as chosen by some of 2019’s most decorated writers. | The Guardian
• “Why has this bizarre Miller-Austen mashup been ignored or disremembered?” On Arthur Miller’s little-known adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. | LARB
• “She is different from other writers and always has been: she is missing an essential gene of propriety.” Patricia Lockwood on Edna O’Brien’s Girl. | London Review of Books
• How long does it take to create a dictionary that charts every way anyone has ever used every word in a language? In the case of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, 125 years and counting. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: On the New Books Network, Carolyn Pouncy and Charles Todd talk Victorian sleuths and the toll of WWI • Michael Eric Dyson on faith, blackness, and Jay-Z, on But That’s Another Story • On (and in) the sewers that transformed Paris • The Astrology Book Club • Read a story from Larry Brown’s collected stories, Tiny Love.