Philip Gourevitch: “The interviews were invented, or devised, or struck upon, as a response to that challenge. How are we going to talk about writing without doing Lit Crit? So it’s very funny that in the process of doing an interview Plimpton gets clocked by Hemingway for doing Lit Crit.”

You want end-of-the-year lists? Miriam Burstein posts a delightfully taxonomic year in reading list containing such intriguing categories as “Best Victorian fiction not read previously,” “Most bizarre Anglican didactic novel acquired this year,” and “Paragraph that probably caused a number of Victorian Catholic readers to roll their eyes in disbelief.”

In this week’s New Yorker, Wyatt Mason serves up a R.K. Narayan profile. For more info on Narayan, check out Jhumpa Lahiri’s essay, which appeared a few months ago in the Boston Review, as well as Pankaj Mishra’s 2001 NYRB essay, and Nandan Datta’s biographical overview. More links can be found here.

Canadian Press: “A woman who used fondue fuel to set her boyfriend’s penis on fire will spend the holidays in jail.”

Renee has put up her first Booktalk podcast, which apparently replaces cars with books and involves Renee and some guy named Eli responding to various voicemails that people leave about books. In any event, do give them a call at 415-992-8622, tell them about “winter books,” and bemuse them with ten-cent words.