Lit List: Monday December 12, 2016

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

• Bob Dylan honored at Nobel Prize Banquet: Patti Smith paid tribute to Dylan, who did not attend the ceremony, by singing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (Huffington Post)
• Zadie Smith on optimism and despair: at a talk given in Berlin this fall, Smith urges “those of us who remember, too, a finer music” to “try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along.” (The New York Review of Books)
• Interview with a Bookstore: Lit Hub talks to Book Culture, a literary staple in New York City (The Guardian)
• Letters and aging: what the epistolary collections of authors can teach us about growing older (The Atlantic)
• A year in poems: revisit The New Yorker’s favorite poems published in 2016 (The New Yorker)
• Remembering Grace Paley: how the writer and activist reminds us “that a political life and an artistic life and a family life can all be the same thing” (Lit Hub)
• New year, new nonfiction: here are five nonfiction books to be excited about in 2017 (Signature Reads)