LitHub Daily: November 25, 2015

• Kathleen Alcott on the ghosts of Thanksgivings past. | Literary Hub
• The moment that changed the Cold War forever: when James B. Donovan met his client, a Soviet master spy. | Literary Hub
• Pandering, but not just to white men: On the nuanced responses to Claire Vaye Watkins’s explosive essay. | Flavorwire
• Orhan Pamuk on writers who talk about food with relish, miniature discussions of identity, and pinning bits of daily life into a novel. | Hazlitt
• Christopher Frizzelle finds the true meaning of Thanksgiving in a ten-year-old story by Charles D’Ambrosio.  |  The Stranger
• Vengeance, rage, and psychological turmoil, “clogged with maggots and tumors.” On Iván Repila’s nightmarish fairytale, The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse. | BOMB Magazine
• William Finnegan on surfing to the “spooky bass riff” and “jagged cymbal beat” of “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” by The Animals. | Wall Street Journal
• “Culture is a humanizing field to transform these monsters to human-scale powers.” Yassin al-Haj Saleh on the importance of dialogue, drawing meaning from suffering, and Syria as a global metaphor. | The New Inquiry
• We tell our doctors stories in order to live: On Terrence Holt’s Internal Medicine and the narratives of our bodies. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “Memory drives memoir, but it can take writing to realize that while we thought we were just living, history was unfolding.” Honor Moore defends the memoir, shares a poem that also is one. | TriQuarterly
• There’s a sorry situation in the United States: My Life on the Road, The Notorious RBG, and America’s fraught history with abortion law. | Signature Reads

Also on Literary Hub: On the rise of ultra-nationalism and the murder of writers in India · A gluttonous reading list · Fatin Abbas on why you should move to Berlin to be a writer · From college graduate to international cocaine smuggler, Randall Horton’s Hook