Lit Hub Daily: November 4, 2022

• How to bake black pepper snowballs… vengefully. | Lit Hub Food

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• Costumes, plotting, mise-en-scène, monologues: Lyle Jeremy Rubin on how war becomes a (deadly) performance. | Lit Hub Memoir

• They lie to us, they weigh about as much as a hardback copy of Infinite Jest, and other fun facts about—drumroll, please—the brain. | Lit Hub Science

• Helene Atwan recounts the remarkable experience of publishing Gayl Jones, the best American novelist to disappear (and come back) twice. | Lit Hub

• Serena Burdick on lessons learned from a 17-year journey to publication: “It takes a certain amount of endurance, a letting go, and a willingness to trust in the thing you love.” | Lit Hub

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• “Sherry hadn’t known what exactly to expect because she had never been to Mexico or had an abortion.” What abortion looked like in 1968. | Lit Hub Politics

• Bono’s Surrender, Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song, and Claire Keegan’s Foster all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• The best new crime and mystery novels out this November. | CrimeReads

• “I got a copy of Edna O’ Brien’s The Country Girls growing up, which hurried my puberty to a place where I thought differently about girls and women.” Rapid-fire book recs from Bono. | The New York Times

• From Reading Lolita in Tehran to Persepolis, Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson recommends books that offer insight into Iranian women’s lives. | NPR

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• Elias Rodriques talks to Saidiya Hartman about her groundbreaking book, Scenes of Subjection, 25 years after its initial publication. | The Nation

• “I’m writing a poet on the other side of the world in the middle of a war for your country. What am I to say?” Reginald Dwayne Betts and Serhiy Zhadan exchange letters about the tough places they come from. | NYRB

• Adrienne Westenfeld considers the problems of storytelling in the age of the mega-franchise. | Esquire

• Brigitte Giraud has won the Prix Goncourt—the 13th woman to do so in 120 years. | The Guardian

• “I want to make sure I say it all, if I can.” David Duchovny talks to Sadie Rebecca Starnes about writing. | Los Angeles Review of Books

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Also on Lit Hub: Sarah Shoemaker on following the book research • History, conflict, and myth-making in Berlin • Read from Kate Manning’s latest novel, Gilded Mountain