Lit Hub Daily: November 2, 2023

• Hannah Lillith Assadi on losing home, identity, and her father: “I wonder what it is I have inherited from him more profoundly: his Palestinian-ness or his propensity to fall?” | Lit Hub Memoir

• At the Refocus Film Festival, Kristen Roupenian and director Susanna Fogel talk about adapting “Cat Person” for film. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• Gary J. Bass offers an essential reading list for centering the Asian experience of World War II. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• “This TV time, we tell our children whenever they get out of bed to interrupt us, is special, sacred, adult time.” Devorah Baum considers the role of watching in art and romance. | Lit Hub Criticism

• What Ahmad Almallah is reading now and next, from The Bell Jar to A World to Win. | Lit Hub Annotated Nightstand

• Nick Romeo reflects on learning modern Greek while living in Athens: “I occupied a murky intermediate zone, somewhere between Byron and Hobhouse, ancient and modern, outsider and local.” | Lit Hub Travel

• “By revisiting and retelling the same stories from her past, she shows that any given account is incomplete.” 5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• “Writing a book is often an exercise in putting down what needs to be said in order to liberate oneself to do something else. In Spears’s case, it is also an attempt to become someone else.” Lauren Michele Jackson considers The Woman in Me. | The New Yorker

• Five displaced journalists on how exile has influenced their writing. | The Dial

• “Seed-spilling has served as a potent metaphor for anxieties over power long before being ‘extremely online’ was even a possibility.” Aya Labanieh digs into the cultural history of anti-masturbation. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• Leah Johnson, author and owner of Indianapolis’s Loudmouth Books, discusses the work of fighting book bans and uplifting marginalized writers. | Esquire

• “Our politics cannot rise to the majesty or horror of this world; neither can they meet the simple, day-to-day realities of life in this country—only art is worthy of the task.” Sterling HolyWhiteMountain contemplates Cormac McCarthy. | High Country News

Also on Lit Hub: What one family lost to fire • November’s best sci-fi and fantasy books • Read from Anna Biller’s debut novel, Bluebeard’s Castle