Lit Hub Daily: October 8, 2019

• “The rest of my life was waiting for me.” Saeed Jones on finding a sense of self in New York City. | Lit Hub Memoir
• “I can’t point to any particular location, let alone a structure, and call it home.” Josephine Rowe talks to Brandon Taylor about craft, climate grief, and the politics of fiction. | Lit Hub
• Long decade, short stories: our choices for the best short story collections of the 2010s. | Lit Hub Best of the Decade
• “Surely there isn’t a complete and unbridgeable gap between them, the children, and us, the grown-ups.” Philip Pullman on children’s literature (and the critics who disdain it). | Lit Hub
• Poverty and prosperity in the American city: on the midcentury battle for urban renewal. | Lit Hub
• “2011.” A poem by Fanny Howe from Love and I. | Lit Hub
• Alix Kates Shulman on how her book found a new voice, 50 years on, within a new feminist movement. | Lit Hub
• A cultural history of Nancy Drew, from Olivia Rutigliano. | CrimeReads
• Ecstasy and Terror author Daniel Mendelsohn recommends five great books about criticism, from Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist to Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. | Book Marks
• Eve Babitz is as brash and unafraid as ever as she addresses the 1997 incident that left her with extensive burns. | The Paris Review
• Who are all these feminist baby books really for? Hint: they’re not for babies. | Slate
• Amazon has unveiled its first Kindle for children. | Engadget
• Does your government have a “Council to Protect Minors from Harmful Publications”? Turkey’s does, and thanks to President Erdoğan, more than 300,000 books have been confiscated or destroyed since 2016. | Haaretz
• Teachers are grappling with whether to teach the books of men “toppled by #MeToo.” | The New York Times
• James Wood on what Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies shares in common with the 19th-century European “novel of adultery.” | The New Yorker
• More than 200 never-before-seen J.D. Salinger artifacts—including a bowl he made at summer camp—will go on display this month at the New York Public Library. | The New York Post

Also on Lit Hub: Five books you may have missed in September • Jeannie Vanasco, Steph Cha, and more take the Lit Hub Questionnaire • Read an excerpt from Alix Kates Shulman’s novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen.