Lit Hub Daily October 26, 2021
TODAY: In 1922, Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf is published by the Hogarth Press of Richmond upon Thames with jacket design by the author’s sister Vanessa Bell.
“The secret reason I read, the only reason I read, is precisely for those moments in which the story being told is deeply and almost mystically alert to the world.” Teju Cole on the wonder of epiphanic writing. | Lit Hub Criticism
Alison Stine puzzles over one of the more fun problems of fiction: how to name your characters. | Lit Hub Craft
Terry Tempest Williams on the appetites of the great Jim Harrison, whose “poems are checkpoints on the map of his soul.” | Lit Hub Poetry
“I think what I really want is for people to miss her as much as I do.” Jenny Qi considers how to write an obituary for your mother. | Lit Hub
Psychoanalyst Josh Cohen looks to Jane Eyre for a lesson about the plus side of narcissism. | Lit Hub
“This is f---ed.” Behind the intellectual property battle that nearly derailed the COVID-19 vaccine. | Lit Hub Science
A history of pop music, a chronicle of Black filmmaking, and a counterhistory of feminism all feature among October’s best reviewed history and politics books. | Book Marks
Rektok Ross recommends nine YA survival thrillers that ask, what wouldn’t you do to survive? | CrimeReads
On Keen On, Margaret D. Jacobs on America’s troubled history of injustice to Indigenous people, and W. Ralph Eubanks takes a journey through the literary history of Mississippi. | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel
A month of literary listening: AudioFile’s best audiobooks of October. | Book Marks 
“Writers write what they have to, reap the consequences, and they alone know what they can bear.” Molly Fisk on the story her uncle, John Updike, wrote about her father. | Harper’s Bazaar
Parul Sehgal wonders: is Amazon changing the novel? | The New Yorker
Lincoln Michel makes the case for the best novel he’s read this year: Percival Everett’s The Trees. | The Biblioracle Recommends
Melissa Lozada-Oliva talks about her new novel-in-verse, Selena’s legacy, and the messiness of Latinidad and representation. | NPR
The authors on the Booker Prize shortlist discuss their inspirations, from a mugshot to a half-million acres of wilderness. | The Guardian
French legislators are taking steps to prevent Amazon from wiping out independent bookstores. | Reuters
“Now, we’re in a situation where even our indie and DIY institutions have some corporate claws in them.” Dan Ozzi on the state of punk and his new book. | Vice
NEW ON LIT HUB RADIO
On Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and the 20th century’s interest in “allowable” murder, on Lit Century. * Hari Kunzru talks Sartre, Red Pill, and his new Instagram account, on The Quarantine Tapes. * Ruth Ozeki on what it means to maintain respectful relationships with material objects, on So Many Damn Books.
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