Lit List: Monday December 5, 2016

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Good evening readers. Here's your round-up of today's must-read literary news, commentary and fiction.

  • Joseph O’Neill on why poetry is the hardest form: “it’s such an extreme, cold, high-up, no-ropes, precipices-everywhere kind of word-sport” The New Yorker

  • Through the Night: how Stig Saeterbakken’s novel can help us through the long, dark night of America’s soul Lit Hub

  • Banned book: To Kill a Mockingbird has been removed from Virginia schools for racist language The Guardian

  • Am I Alone Here? Peter Orner’s new book examines the inherent loneliness of writing Electric Literature

  • A comic about us: “Once upon a time, a civilization lived” Catapult

  • Learning to speak Midwestern: a review of Edward McClelland’s new book of dialectology The New York Times

  • The wars on Christmas: Canadian historian Gerry Bowler examines the history of denouncing Christmas Slate