“Reality has outpaced Pynchon’s fictional conspiracies.”

Literary Hub’s picks for the year’s best criticism: Patricia Lockwood on the collected prose of Sylvia Plath, Parul Sehgal examining how reality has outpaced Thomas Pynchon’s fictional conspiracies, Namwali Serpell on the cyclical nature of literary innovation, and Michael Ledger-Lomas’s 4,000-word excavation of William Morris’s ambivalence toward literature.