Lit Hub Daily: October 6, 2021

• “Poetry might seem like an inconsequential side-casualty in a larger, noisier war, but in fact it is central to the story of ownership of ideas and expressions.” Sam Riviere in defense of poetic plagiarism. | Lit Hub Poetry

  Article continues after advertisement

• Bonnie Friedman reflects on the “bookstore of envy” from her youth, writerly self-doubt, and growing into gratitude. | Lit Hub

• Miriam Toews on Grapes of Wrath and writing honestly. | Lit Hub Questionnaire

• “If you made a good taco, everyone wanted to know if it was scalable.” Dave Eggers talks about escaping corporate tech and his upcoming novel. | Lit Hub

• As aquifers decline, Kansas is becoming Ground Zero for the imminent water crisis. What does that mean for the future? | Lit Hub Climate Change

• On the unhinged pleasures of speculative nonfiction: Patrick Allington reads the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena report alongside Chariot of the Gods? | Lit Hub 

• “A cycle was finished, a whole Odyssey.” Diane di Prima remembers her friend Freddie Herko. | Lit Hub

• “You might have heard them called—dismissed as—runaways or hustlers. But you don’t know their names…” David Nelson on the need to respect the lives of John Wayne Gacy’s victims. | CrimeReads

• Margaret Verble on Chinua Achebe, Flannery O’Connor, and the largest primary source of information on the Cherokee Indians of the late 1700s. | Book Marks

• Bad art friends: Robert Kolker tells the story of inspiration, appropriation, and litigation between two writers. | New York Times Magazine

• Jonathan Franzen on his most memorable reads. | Elle

• Paul Griner discusses his latest book, his writing habits, and genre writing. | Full Stop

• Nobel Committee Chair Anders Olsson addresses the new commitment to broadening the prize’s horizons. | The New Republic

• “If someone wanted to build a young woman specifically for the purpose of being hated by the internet, she was what they would’ve wrought.” Scaachi Koul considers the legacy of Marie Calloway. | Buzzfeed News

• Minjie Chen on what makes a good translation and why Julia Lovell’s translation of Monkey King is “the best English edition … I have ever read.” | Los Angeles Review of Books

• Tirzah Price lays out the case for joining your local library board. | Book Riot

Also on Lit Hub: Laura Moulton and Ben Hodgon on starting a bicycle-powered library • How fanfiction can inspire meaningful social change • Read from James Han Mattson’s latest novel, Reprieve