Lit Hub Daily: October 7, 2019

• Gabrielle Bellot considers the darkness at the heart of Jamaica Kincaid’s children’s mystery, Party. | Lit Hub
• Crystal Hana Kim and Laura van den Berg discuss research as a creative act, the limits of first-person narration, and what it means to “learn to write.” | Lit Hub
• “The dead girls are speaking everywhere.” On the endless parade of literary dead girls. | Lit Hub
• “Per Engdahl was a great man, and I’ll maintain that as long as I live.” On the far right past of Ingvar Kamprad, founder of Ikea. | Lit Hub Politics
•  “Not going to walk on eggshells anymore.” Minda Honey on finding the freedom to rage her father. | Lit Hub Memoir
• “Every child of immigrants is born into a sense of loss.” On the universal urgency of immigrant literature. | Lit Hub
• “The times, words, and players change; the issues and their urgency do not.” Adele Logan Alexander traces her family’s history from her suffragette grandmothers. | Lit Hub Memoir
• In Nazism, Joseph Roth saw the end of Europe’s cosmopolitan dream. | Lit Hub
• Reading Gaol, the English prison where Oscar Wilde infamously served time for “gross indecency,” has been put up for sale. | BBC
• Erica Wagner writes on four recent books about ghosts and haunted sites, including a collection of Edith Wharton’s ghost stories and Laird Hunt’s novel of witchcraft in colonial New England. | Financial Times
• New adaptations of Jane Austen’s unpublished works are showcasing her “sharp, satirical, and proto-feminist” sides. | The Atlantic
• “These aren’t your traditional book clubs.” Black-led organizations in Boston taking new approaches to connect communities with a love for literature. | The Boston Globe
• “A Doll’s House” once inspired Lupita Nyong’o to break up with her boyfriend. | The New York Times
• “His children grown or in their teens, his job and his reputation secure—Heaney decided to write about happiness.” On the optimism of Seamus Heaney. | The New Yorker
• How to take a literary selfie. | Granta

Also on Lit Hub: America in Mosul: an account of the occupation of an Iraqi city • Who are the Leo DiCaprios of the Booker Prize? Lucia Tang on the perpetually snubbed • Read a story from Jac Jemc’s collection False Bingo.