The Best of Last (Crusade)

At the helm of The Paris Review‘s advice column this week, Sasha Frere-Jones describes Sheila Heti‘s How Should a Person Be ? as the inverse of Elaine Dundy‘s The Dud Avacado.

Just in time for AWP, The New York Times has published a look at “Why Writers Love to Hate the MFA.” We’ve published several other perspectives on the degree over the years, like this, this, this and this.

“We have all heard the claim, ‘the victors write the textbooks.’ Among the many ways to unpack the phrase is this: that once upon a time history was bound to and relied on communally agreed upon facts. That is to say, there was not a culture of record the way there is now. There were not cameras and photographs capturing all human movement or digital archives where information was stored in ‘clouds.’ While our methods for remembering have evolved, the ethical question at the heart of recollection remains: how do we tell about the past and who gets to tell it?” Lindsey Drager writes for the Michigan Quarterly Review about memory and storytelling.

You can call off the search, Millions readers–we have been given the year-end list to end all year-end lists. The good people over at The Literary Hub spent countless hours poring over social media accounts to bring you the most important “best of” you’ll see all year, The Biggest Cuties in Publishing.