Lit Hub Daily: October 31, 2022

• Must sex always mean death in horror movies? | Lit Hub Criticism

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• THE ART OF THE HAND-SELL: Indie booksellers share their favorite spooky, eerie, and uncanny books for Halloween. | Lit Hub Halloween!

• “I personally have one, simple definition: a ghost is a manifestation of longing.” GennaRose Nethercott on the places ghost stories live. | Lit Hub

• Mia Florin-Sefton considers Barbarian, Jane Eyre, and how contemporary horror films are using the gothic to critique the politics of housing. | Lit Hub

• The foremothers of the occult: Meet the women behind ouija and tarot. | Lit Hub

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• “Beauty became a narcotic.” Barbara Chase-Riboud remembers the whirlwind of life in the 1960s art world. | Lit Hub Memoir

• River Halen recommends books in which consciousness gets the role of protagonist. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• The month in literary listening: AudioFile’s best audiobooks of October. | Book Marks

• Jennifer Wilson explores the ghost stories of the formerly enslaved: “The enslaved turned to the supernatural realm in order to subvert the conditions of slavery itself.” | The New York Times

• “On a pickup basketball court, no matter how good you are, you ask to be let on a team, and into the game. Which is to say, you are a perpetual guest.” Ross Gay on John Edgar Wideman’s Hoop Roots. | Orion

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• Revisiting Dubravka Ugrešić’s Thank You for Not Reading: “Her analysis of identity politics seems more relevant now than it did 20 years ago.” | LARB

• “He wanted to find new ways of looking at plants, to see them on their terms.” Natalie Lawrence on Darwin’s fascination with tracking the movement of plants. | The Public Domain Review

• Vi Khi Nao writes about the continued urgency of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee. | The Baffler

• Arrowsmith Press continues their series of conversations with Ukrainian writers with Borys and Liudmila Khersonsky talking to Marie Howe. | Arrowsmith Press

• Janell Ross reports from the “Books Unbanned” bus tour with scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw and other organizers. | TIME

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• Patricia Thang recommends Japanese historical fiction. | Book Riot

Also on Lit Hub: The 10 best book covers of October • A reading list of pet deaths from E.B. Bartels • Read from Adam Soto’s story collection, Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep: Ghost Stories