Lit Hub Daily: October 19, 2023

• “The ambition of the book is to tell the whole story of Israel/Palestine.” Nathan Thrall talks to Masha Gessen about his new book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. | Lit Hub In Conversation

• “The fact that literature is not helpless is proven by the fact that it attracts power.” Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka on a lifetime of art and activism. | Lit Hub

• Fleeing the Kremlin: Masha Udensiva-Brenner on the lives of Russian expats in Tbilisi, the new Casablanca. | Lit Hub Politics

• What Catherine Chen is reading now and next, from The Classic of Mountain and Seas to Strange Writing. | Lit Hub Annotated Nightstand

• Journey into Audenworld: Michael O’Sullivan follows W.H. Auden across Europe. | Lit Hub Biography

• “The terror Shibli evokes intensifies slowly, smoldering, until it is shining off the page.” 5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• Elissa Suh reviews literary fare from the New York Film Festival, including Poor Things, The Beast, and Foe. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• David Remnick talks to reporter Patricia Evangelista about her book Some People Need Killing, which chronicles the Duterte presidency and its extralegal drug wars in the Philippines. | The New Yorker

• Your local Barnes & Noble may be getting a makeover. | The New York Times

• More than 600 writers and artists have signed an open letter “demand[ing] an end to the violence and destruction in Palestine.” | London Review of Books

• “You can’t cure loneliness because you can’t cure the power of refusal and any entity worth being in a relationship with has the power to refuse, the power to render us lonely.” Daisy Alioto on AI and loneliness. | Dirt

• “I like to establish what the goal is for the person I’m writing about. What do they want from telling their story?” Naomi Skwarna and Rachel Kushner in conversation. | Hazlitt

• “Her poetry talks to us about us, not to herself.” Meghan O’Rourke on her mentor, Louise Glück. | The Yale Review

Also on Lit Hub: Ahmed Naji narrates his own obscenity trial • Dispatches from a sensory deprivation tank • Read from Anbara Salam’s latest novel, Hazardous Spirits