Lit Hub Daily: October 9, 2019

• Ceci n’est pas un clickbait: Eve Babitz on the time she played chess nude with Marcel Duchamp. | Lit Hub
• “The email inbox is an illusion, a metaphor, a construct.” On the scattered, ad-ridden archive of our lives. | Lit Hub
• Billy Kahora on the life and writing of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a giant of world literature. | Lit Hub
• Worried about being buried alive? Some posthumous concerns addressed by mortician Caitlin Doughty. | Lit Hub
• In which Daniel Mendelsohn wishes someone would ask him about gardening (and answers questions about books). | Lit Hub
• “This was a rich dish devised for rich people.” On the bougie, classist history of Eggs Benedict. | Lit Hub
• When all else fails, ask Juliet: letters to Shakespeare’s star-crossed lover/contemporary advice columnist. | Lit Hub
• This week in Shhh… Secrets of the Librarian: Michigan-based children’s librarian Randi Foor-Dalton on marginalized communities, Indigenous histories, and Bat Girl the librarian. | Book Marks
• Andy Martin spent a year with Lee Child as he wrote the new Jack Reacher novel. Things got pretty strange—and insightful. | CrimeReads
• Here are the finalists for the 2019 National Book Awards. | The Hub
• As part of Flint, Michigan’s “public health, recovery, and resilience programming,” the city named its first poet laureate, Semaj Brown. | MLive
• UNESCO has named Tbilisi, Georgia, World Book Capital for 2021. Programs will cater to “children, youngsters and readers who have limited access to books.” | UNESCO
• Daniel Drake, a self-described “professional nitpicker,” proofreads the President. | New York Review of Books
• “One hippo, alone once more, misses the other forty-four.” Read a profile of board book maven Sandra Boynton. | The Atlantic
• Should chefs be able to copyright their signature recipes? | Eater
• The next logical step in autofiction: an interview with Ben Lerner’s mother. | The Cut

Also on Lit Hub: Introducing the SpeakEasy podcast, hosted by Amanda Foreman and Lucas Wittmann • Kalisha Buckhanon discusses her new novel, Speaking of Summer, on Reading Women • Why office workers can’t sleep (and why that’s bad) • When a hurricane hits: a story of America’s urban rise and fall • Read an excerpt from Christine Féret-Fleury’s The Girl Who Reads on the Métro.