Lit Hub Daily: October 24, 2023

• “Beneath the headlines of blockbusters and bestsellers, underneath the froth of the book fairs, something is terribly wrong.” Why Toni Morrison left jer job in publishing. | Lit Hub History

• Jesmyn Ward! Tim O’Brien! Here are 25 new books out today. | The Hub

• Lucy Sante considers the poetic evolution of Bob Dylan. | Lit Hub Music

• How likely is it that aliens could get to our solar system? | Lit Hub Space!

• Why you should read the forgotten essays of Louisa May Alcott, whose “writing genius defied genre.

• “Always I find more answers in a forest than I find in my own hot attic of a mind.” Margaret Renkl on foraging for fungi (instead of writing). | Lit Hub

• Why you should read the forgotten essays of Louisa May Alcott, whose “writing genius defied genre.” | Lit Hub Criticism

• “It shouldn’t be hard to prove that you’re a person—but Britney has been so often ignored and misunderstood, used up and thrown away.” Christine Smallwood on The Woman in Me. | Vulture

• Are our attention spans really getting shorter? | The Guardian

• “I decided, soon after Vincent’s death, to stop pondering the alternatives. What if belongs to fiction; what now, to this real life.” Yiyun Li reflects on gardening and grief. | The New Yorker

• Jeanette Winterson on the place for ghosts in the metaverse. | The Paris Review

• “Should authors of poems and novels view chatbots as creative collaborators or as formal containers?” Terry Nguyen reviews three new novels co-written with AI. | Boston Review

Also on Lit Hub: Marie NDiaye on a novel’s twists and turns • A reading list of meta-narrators • Read from Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel, Let Us Descend