In the final weekly-round up of the year, a selection of the articles, reviews, interviews and miscellany that have caught my eye this holiday season. Including: reflections on the legacy of actress and screenwriter Carrie Fisher; an interview with Bethany Rose Lamont, whose print journal Doll Hospital uses art and literature to explore mental health issues; 2016’s most essential jazz reissue; and much more.

Literature, Poetry, Theatre

• Reading Biographical Fiction: An interview with Michael Lackey
• Levinas, Derrida, and  the Literary Afterlife of Religion: An interview with Sarah Hammerschlag
• A Visit to Doll Hospital: A new print journal that explores mental health issues through art and literature
• Alan Mandell will finish his career the way he started it: with a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame
• From Octavia Butler‘s journals: her list of what is “sexy”
• ‘This isn’t a cyberpunk future. This is the Restoration Hardware version of a cyberpunk future’ — William Gibson
• The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin
• Sylvia Townsend Warner‘s Lolly Willowes is ‘a great shout of life’
• The Economist explains Stefan Zweig‘s revival
• UK Communities needing libraries as much as ever
• Reconsidering Virginia Woolf‘s Christmas diaries written between 1920-1940
• Alex Wells’ illustrated Isaac Asimov volumes
• A historical look at underground Black publishing in America, from W.E.B. Du Bois to Black Lives Matter
• The Rise of Science Fiction from Pulp Mags to Cyberpunk
• Writing advice from John Steinbeck, from a letter in 1962
• Review of Reiner Stach’s Kafka biography in Prospect Magazine
• “Sometimes it looks as if the power of the mind has been nullified by the volume of experiences.” —Saul Bellow

Art, Design, Photography

• How Edward Hopper “storyboarded” his iconic painting Nighthawks
• Teju Cole selects the best photo books of 2016
• Aleksi Pöyry on why Moominvalley in November is a Finnish classic and the best book of 1970
• Alex Wells’ illustrated Isaac Asimov volumes
• Virtual reconstructions of lost Frank Lloyd Wright buildings
• The entire Frieze archive, from the 1991 pilot issue to today, is freely available online
• Female Pioneers of the Bauhaus
• A Visit to Doll Hospital: A new print journal that explores mental health issues through art and literature

Philosophy & Theory

• Levinas, Derrida, and  the Literary Afterlife of Religion: An interview with Sarah Hammerschlag
• Nietzsche’s 10 Rules for writing with style (1882)

Music

• The Year’s Most Essential Jazz Reissue
• How Bach helped one Czech girl survive Auschwitz: ‘you always feel in his music that God is present somehow.’
• Joan Baez to be inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017

Film & TV

• On Carrie Fisher, Hollywood, and reclaiming women’s voices
• Carrie Fisher’s legacy may rest as much on her literary voice as on any character she played
• Martin Scorsese’s Silence has turned theology into art—which is a radical act
• Stanley Kubrick sitting in a chair playing with a cat on the set of A Clockwork Orange
• The morality of banking in It’s a Wonderful Life

News, History, Politics

• ‘We Have to Resist’: A Conversation with Rebecca Solnit
• Meet the amateur working at home who created a bigger archive of historical newspapers than the Library of Congress

Call for Papers

• The City as Modernist Ephemera, London, June 2017