Lit Hub Daily: August 18, 2023

• Doting moms, little societies, and other endearing cockroach traits. | Lit Hub

• “I was drawn to neuroscience for the same reasons that I was drawn to writing.” Temi Oh in praise of (neuro)science fiction. | Lit Hub Science

• As we count down to the second annual Refocus Film Festival, Gyasi Hall talks to Lizzy Goodman about the fleeting amateur spirit of Meet Me in the Bathroom. | Lit Hub Music & Film

• Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, William Boyd’s The Romantic, and Patti Hartigan’s August Wilson: A Life all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• “At the risk of taking wordplay too seriously, I’ll note that there is a name for what is happening here, grammatically. The word is its own mouthful: ‘nominalization.’” Lauren Michele Jackson on novelty coinages. | The New Yorker

• Adam Kirsch considers Zadie Smith and the young Gen X novelists. | Harper’s

• “I wanted to write a poem about how the extreme heat of the ocean is breaking my heart, but the whales beat me to it.” Alexis Pauline Gumbs on making sense of images of a climate in crisis. | Harper’s Bazaar

• Elizabeth Metzger interviews the anonymous creator of the Instagram account @poetryisnotaluxury. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• Molly Templeton explores the ritual of rearranging your books. | Tor

Also on Lit Hub: Stephanie Heit on joining a lineage of authors with mental health difference • Eight books about intelligent sea creatures • Read a story from Cleo Qian’s debut collection, Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go