Lit Hub Daily: October 18, 2024

☆☆☆ THE ISSUES: 2024 ☆☆☆

Lit Hub is going beyond the memes for an in-depth look at the everyday issues affecting Americans as they head to the polls on November 5th. Today we consider the failings of the American healthcare system, including why pharmaceutical companies can’t be trusted to keep insulin affordable,  the ten best books for understanding the opioid crisis, and much more. | Lit Hub Politics

• On this week’s episode of The Lit Hub Podcast, the gang gets into their favorite spooky season reads. | Lit Hub Radio 
• How should you pop the question? Dominique Ansel suggests hot chocolate with pink champagne marshmallows for a memorable sweet treat. | Lit Hub Food
• Emily J. Orlando considers the interior designs of Edith Wharton: “While she would become recognized as a master of fiction…The Decoration of Houses put Wharton on the map as an authority on domestic aesthetics at the turn into the century.” | Lit Hub Criticism
• “To be the hero or victim of one’s story is to deny the lines of power that cross and enervate our bodies.” Towards a new poetics of illness and healing.  | Lit Hub Memoir
• Al Pacino’s Sonny Boy, Mark Haddon’s Dogs and Monsters, and Bob Woodward’s War all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks

• “When I look back at the sketchbooks I kept over the decade I did visual art, they are not full of drawings. They are full of words. “ Rebecca Nagle on the link between writing and fiber arts. | Lit Hub Craft

• Steve Burgess chronicles how the “grand tour” shaped generations of 19th-century elites. | Lit Hub History
• Cundill Prize finalist Gary J. Bass recommends books on the Asian experience of World War II, including work by Kazuo Ishiguro, Rana Mitter, Richard Flanagan, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• “Freddy Evans gazed at the freshly excavated set of human remains with a peculiar feeling in his stomach.” Read from Jeff Biggers and Andrew Davis’s new novel, Disturbing the Bones. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Eric Lach on the 119-year-old book that explains New York City mayor Eric Adams. | The New Yorker 
• On reconciling the aesthetics of Ralph Ellison’s photographs with his writing. | New York Review of Books
• “As had been the case for Baldwin with his father, so I began to realize that everything my father had been … had been shaped by the violence of the social world.” Didier Eribon considers James Baldwin’s relationship with his father alongside his own. | MIT Press Reader
• “Capitalism confirms—time and time again—the falsehood of its mythical self-conception as a system that bolsters the progressive enrichment of everyone.” Alan Mendoza Sosa on ana c. buena by Valeria Román Marroquín. | Asymptote
• K.E. Semmel asks debut novelists how they measure success. | The Millions
• Garth Risk Hallberg on the abduction of writing fiction. | Granta