At Poynter, Daniel Funke At Folio, ten creative directors pick their favorite magazine covers of the year, including Marilyn Minter’s cover shot of Lady Gaga for the New York Times Magazine, Time magazine’s fold-out cover for their “Guns in America” story, and New York magazine’s Stormy Daniels cover, shot by Amanda Demme.
Many long-running magazines closed in 2018, including the Village Voice, Interview, and Tin House. Hmm Daily has the full rundown in “The Year in Dead Publications.”
Vol. 1 Brooklyn has a list of the best fiction of the year. They’ve included some of the consensus picks (The Largess of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson, Severance by Ling Ma), and some lesser-known titles worth investigating, such as Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre and Ondjaki’s Transparent City.
On the National Book Critics Circle Critical Mass blog, Jonathan Leal revisits Italo Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveller, recommending it as one of the great books about books.