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.”