Lit Hub Daily: November 4, 2019

• “Might it be that some places have not only an embedded past, but an embedded future also?” Alan Moore on William Blake and the supernatural poetry of place. | Lit Hub
• On homesickness and displacement in the millennial memoir: Nathan Scott McNamara reads Jennifer Croft, Joanna Howard, and more. | Lit Hub
• Clémentine Goldszal navigates France’s fall publishing frenzy, aka “Oscar season for books.” | Lit Hub
• Philip Goff and Philip Pullman talk materialism, panpsychism, and philosophical zombies, as one does. | Lit Hub
• How ghost stories spread in the era of social media: Sarah Rose Cavanagh on fables, Momo, and hivemind. | Lit Hub
• “However excellent they might be, books can slip off like water.” Connor Harrison on lessons from hauling his library across an ocean. | Lit Hub
• Maris Kreizman profiles Carmen Maria Machado, “a genre annihilator who makes the mere act of trying to distinguish between horror and sci-fi/fantasy and literary writing feel petty and irrelevant.” | BuzzFeed News
• Guess they wanted to outdo the tote bag: The Library of America plans to put out the “definitive collected edition” of Joan Didion’s work. The first in a series will include Didion’s first five books. | Authorlink
• Is Oprah’s Book Club “the most culturally resonant part of her powerful legacy”? Reporter Jamilah King argues that African American reading experiences wouldn’t be the same without it. | Mother Jones
• “To describe the world more fully is to change it.” Elif Batuman revisits Edith Wharton’s (ever-current) The Age of Innocence. | The New York Times
• Kids love printed books. So why would we give them Amazon’s new e-reader for kids? | The Washington Post
• What’s behind novelist Harriet Wilson’s “123-year erasure from American literary history”? | Zora
• “It’s not as easy to describe as what I wrote in my apocalypse stories, to witness the incineration of a way of life.” Aja Gabel on the California wildfires and finding hope in the apocalypse. | Alta

Also on Lit Hub: On But That’s Another Story, Gary Janetti talks Charles Dickens, Armistead Maupin, and reading sitcom scripts • A poem by Amy Gerstler from the California issue of Freeman’s • Care and abuse: lessons of the motherly daughter • Read from Aleksandra Lun’s debut novel The Palimpsests (trans. Elizabeth Bryer).