Lit Hub Daily: October 4, 2022

• Ray Nayler compiles an annotated bibliography of octopus videos that helped him write his novel (and are very fun to watch). | Lit Hub Nature

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• Stephen King pens an ode to Maine cuisine—plus, a recipe for Cujo-inspired French toast casserole. | Lit Hub Food

• Elizabeth McCracken rediscovers the first message she ever inscribed (in the first edition of her first book). | Lit Hub Memoir

• Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan on learning from each other’s processes—and becoming friends—while co-writing a novel. | Lit Hub

• Kelcey Ervick reflects on being a goalkeeper—like Nabokov and Camus—who wanted to be a writer. | Lit Hub Sports

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• Warnings from Wuhan: How virologists in China worked to tell the world about COVID-19. | Lit Hub Science

• “Writing didn’t enter my mind, and that, in part, was the point of the schedule.” Ryan Lee Wong on living in a monastery during the pandemic. | Lit Hub

• The best new crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers of October. | CrimeReads

• “Everything that’s in the book has its roots in something that’s happened.” Celeste Ng on her new novel and the power of art. | NPR

• Alex Shephard shares his annual wild speculations on who will win the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. | The New Republic

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• “The inability to write was agonizing, and I remained incapable of talking about it with anyone in my life. In January, 2016, I e-mailed Jeb again.” Adam Dalva on his unlikely correspondence with Jeb Bush. | The New Yorker

• Mariana Enríquez on horror and complicity: “Maybe I turn up the volume to 11 because of the genre I like to work in, but the genre puts a light on the real horror that gets lost.” | The Guardian

• What comes after #NameTheTranslator? | Words Without Borders

• Richard Joseph asks: “Where is Donna Tartt in our collective account of contemporary literature?” | Los Angeles Review of Books

• Meet the booksellers of Little District Books, a queer-owned bookstore “where community building forms the backbone of the shop.” | The GW Hatchet

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Also on Lit Hub: An illustrated (incomplete) list of New York City’s best bookstore storefronts • A reading list of fiercely political women • Read from Rodrigo Blanco Calderón’s newly translated collection, Sacrifices (tr. Thomas Bunstead)