Lit Hub Daily: November 8, 2018

• “Delusion plus diligent work.” Karen E. Bender on the traits that just might mean you’re a real writer… | Lit Hub
• The antidote to all those 30 under 30 lists out there: 20 debut works of fiction by women over 40. | Lit Hub
• How much did Emily Dickinson’s earliest editors alter her poetry after her death? (Spoiler: kind of a lot.) | Lit Hub
• “Booksellers believe in the free exchange of ideas.” How rare booksellers around the world rallied against an Amazon-owned company—and won. | Lit Hub
• Craig Morgan Teicher on the moment Sylvia Plath found her genius. | Lit Hub
• “She was king. Nothing else.” On the rise of Neferusobek, Egypt’s first woman ruler. | Lit Hub
• Veronica Scott Esposito on the queering of boundaries in Cristina Rivera Garza’s fiction. | Lit Hub
• From Ursula K. Le Guin to N.K. Jemisin, Leah Schnelbach recommends 5 Sci-FI and Fantasy books to look out for in November. | Book Marks
• A beatifying of Lucia Berlin, a savaging of Jill Soloway, and more Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• Take a tour of the sordid delights and criminal underworld of historic Port Townsend with Katrina Carrasco. | CrimeReads
• “Why are these the manuscripts that have survived, and what wandering spirit has guarded them down the centuries?” Josephine Livingstone on the four remaining original books written in Old English. | The New Republic
• “Conventionally, there have been two ways to view Gellhorn: as a seductress or a shrew.” How Martha Gellhorn found her success—in spite of Ernest Hemingway. | Kinfolk
• Introducing Mamikhlapinatana, the burgeoning media company that some have called the “Russian New Yorker.” | Calvert Journal
• What do Queen Elizabeth and Lisbeth Salander from Stieg Laarson’s Millennium series have in common? Claire Foy, apparently. | The Atlantic
• The arduous process of casting the Lilas and Elenas for HBO’s My Brilliant Friend adaptation. | Vulture
• “In both literature and games, enigmas must have a resolution.” On Pokémon and fiction. | The New York Times
• “The Gift is the last novel I wrote, or ever shall write, in Russian.” On Vladimir Nabokov and what it means to say goodbye to a language. | Ploughshares

Also on Lit Hub: The “dream techniques” Ishiguro used to write The Unconsoled • Meet National Book Award in Nonfiction finalists Sarah Smarsh and Adam Winkler • Read from Those Who Knew