The weekly round-up brings together the articles, reviews, interviews and miscellany that has caught my eye over the past seven days. Including: 10 moments that rocked the literary world in 2016; Siri Hustvedt on modern misogyny; the growing resurgence of Philip Roth’s ‘what if?’ historical novel The Plot Against America; and much more.

Literature, Poetry, Theatre

• The Year in Review: 10 Moments That Rocked the Literary World in 2016
• Alice Munro: Master of the Contemporary Short Story
• Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi
• The Beckett Circle: Autumn 2016 Issue Now Online
• Aldous Huxley to George Orwell: My dystopia is better than yours
• Jeanette Winterson talks to Deborah Treisman about her book of Christmas stories and her own Dickensian childhood
• The Root: Give one of these 26 books by black authors as a gift for the holidays
• A new literary biography considers how Vladimir Nabokov & Edmund Wilson went from friends to enemies
• A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex and the Mind by Siri Hustvedt
• Siri Hustvedt: ‘Trump was elected because misogyny is alive and well’
• In A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, Siri Hustvedt contemplates art, sex and science
• First trailer of Amazon’s biopic of Zelda Fitzgerald starring Christina Ricci is out
• “I began writing in high school, writing novel after novel and always throwing them out.” —Joyce Carol Oates
• What the trial of Madame Bovary revealed about the freedom of the press
• It Can Happen Here! Renewed interest in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America
• How Virago Press changed feminist publishing forever
• Don DeLillo‘s description of New York City at Christmas-time
• Peter Mendelsund on redesigning The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Vertigo by W.G. Sebald
• Shirley Hazzard: Rediscover the literary legacy of the acclaimed Australian-American writer
• Four writers on the literary women who most inspire them
• Shirley Jackson centenary: a quiet, hidden rage
• Adrienne Brown on how early “sky-scrapers” shifted our perception of race in America
• Death by Entertainment in the Work of Michael Crichton
• Meet Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s overlooked artist sister
• How Science Fiction helps make sense of an uncertain future
• On the exhibit commemorating the 150th anniversary of Charles Baudelaire‘s death
• Stéphane Mallarmé built an intellectual defense against the agony of mourning
• “A person does not always look like himself,” Dostoevsky writes of sitting for his portrait by Vasily Perov
• Fight Club‘s dark fantasies have become an even darker reality
• How the radio inspired and informed the unforgettable work of Muriel Spark

Art, Design, Photography

• Irving Penn’s ‘Portraits in a Corner’ (circa 1948) – Gropius, O’Keeffe, Duchamp, Dietrich
• Night in the woodblock prints of Tsuchiya Kōitsu (1870-1949)
• The History of Western Architecture: From Ancient Greece to Rococo (A Free Online Course)
• Why one writer National Post argues European power and authority fuelled modern art
• The best graphic novels of all time
• Salvador Dalí creates a dream sequence for Spellbound, Hitchcock’s psychoanalytic thriller
• Watch Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved characters enter the real world
• Peter Mendelsund on redesigning The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Vertigo by W.G. Sebald
• Joachim Patinir‘s biblical ‘world landscapes’ (1512-1524)
• Watch M.C. Escher make his final artistic creation in the 1971 film Adventures in Perception
• Meet Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s overlooked artist sister
• Rare exhibition of Paul Cézanne‘s modern portraits set to tour London, Paris & Washington

Philosophy & Theory

• John McKeane’s Literary Encyclopedia entry on Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

Music

• Watch Miles Davis improvise music for “Elevator to the Gallows,” Louis Malle’s thriller
• Charles Mingus’ “top secret” eggnog recipe Ccntains “enough alcohol to put down an elephant.”
• Recordings of jazz legends that haven’t been heard by the public since the 1930s are finally being released
• A neural network that has learned to produce choral cantatas in the style of Bach

Film & TV

• Batman Unmasked: Analyzing A Cultural Icon
• 50 modern classics: How many of these 21st-century greats have you seen?
• Blowup 50th anniversary: in search of the London locations
• Antonioni’s Blowup, a countercultural masterpiece about the act of seeing and the art of image making is on its way to Criterion Collection
• Watch Miles Davis improvise music for “Elevator to the Gallows,” Louis Malle’s thriller
• First trailer of Amazon’s biopic of Zelda Fitzgerald starring Christina Ricci is out
• Creators of The Man in the High Castle: there are ‘deeply disturbing’ parallels
• Salvador Dalí creates a dream sequence for Spellbound, Hitchcock’s psychoanalytic thriller
• The Eyes of Hitchcock: A mesmerizing video essay on the expressive power of eyes in Hitchcock’s films
• Watch Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved characters enter the real world
• The Feminist Politics of Star Wars
• The Big Sleep: Seventy years since Howard Hawks’ electrifying film noir masterpiece
• Fight Club‘s dark fantasies have become an even darker reality
• John Waters writes an ode to his childhood home

News, History, Politics

• Siri Hustvedt: ‘Trump was elected because misogyny is alive and well’
• Anne Frank may not have been betrayed to Nazi occupiers, but captured by chance, says new study
• Despite work on gender equality in academia, the problem of all male panels persists
• The curious and ongoing history of the golem
• John Edgar Wideman adds a quietly harrowing postscript to the tragedy of Emmett Till
• Library closures ‘will double unless immediate action is taken’