Lit Hub Daily: October 30, 2018

• “I am still in Baghdad. I almost died yesterday, and the day before.” Photojournalist Lynsey Addario’s letters home from Iraq. | Lit Hub
• How much of “The Dead” is based on James Joyce’s own family? Colm Tóibín on the greatest short story ever written. | Lit Hub
• Early adventures in gonzo journalism and mint juleps. OR: the time James Salter inspired Hunter S. Thompson’s booze-soaked trip to the Kentucky Derby. | Lit Hub
• “He was a hybrid of the 20th-century radical intellectual and the 19th century liberal moralist.” Adam Kirsch on Lionel Trilling’s literary criticism. | Lit Hub
• “I take this blend of optimism and fear and use it in the best ways I know how.” Meg Wolitzer and Andre Dubus III discuss curiosity, empathy, and what it’s like to write a novel. | Lit Hub
• On liars, fabulists, and make-believers: how literary hoax might be the most underappreciated genre. | Lit Hub
• “I find that horror can often be a very realistic way of expressing how the world feels.” An interview with Joseph Fink, creator of Welcome to Night Vale and Alice Isn’t Dead. | CrimeReads
• We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress author Craig Morgan Teicher on five books about starting out as a poet. | Book Marks
• Curl up with one of these 10 terrifying 21st century novels this Halloween…if you dare. | Book Marks
• Poet and playwright Ntozake Shange, author of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, has died at age 70. | The Root
• From Isle of Dogs to The Woman with the Five Elephants: On the representation of interpreters and literary translators in film. | Asymptote
• “He spends his life and work in the transitional spaces between spaces where anything can—and often does—happen”: A.M. Homes interviews doctor and sculptor Saul Melman. | BOMB
• Jami Attenberg on the chaos and precision of Julie Doucette’s comics. | Slate
• “Yelapa, Mexico—Sharks, scorpions, coconut grove—THUD THUD—three kids. Hurricane.” Read Lucia Berlin’s account of the pitfalls of her various dwellings. | The Paris Review
• Family Trust author Kathy Wang recomments eight books about family money, from the Corleones to the Spraggs. | Electric Lit
• Rare bookseller Elizabeth Young is opening a dedicated cookbook shop in Brooklyn. | Grub Street

Also on Lit Hub: The final installment of our wildly hot-button series: the 10 books that defined the 2010s. • Meet National Book Award in Children’s Literature finalists Christopher Paul Curtis and Leslie Connor. • Read from The Black Spider.