TODAY: In 1932, children’s author Katherine Paterson, whose novel Bridge to Terabithia ranks number 8 on the American Library Association list of most commonly challenged books in the United States for 1990–1999, is born.
- The effect is more often grotesque than terrible: Read an 1897 review of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. | Book Marks
- “We outsiders must take full possession of our demographic specificity and our collective rage to define ourselves, and therefore our country.” Antoinette Nwandu on reading Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider after Charlottesville. | LARB
- A much-needed oral history of the classic American essay “It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.” | The Atlantic
- The world nearly lost Clarice Lispector in 1966: Kristopher Jansma on the fire that destroyed Lispector’s unfinished work and her subsequent movement into a “second life of letters.” | Electric Literature
- “It’s this brilliance and impatience, with this bedrock of insecurity underneath, that Hamilton and Kvothe share.” On the partnership between Patrick Rothfuss and Lin-Manuel Miranda and their adaptation of The Name of the Wind. | Vulture
- “What has the Big Data approach to literature added up to?” A look back at what critic Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” strategy of literary scholarship has and hasn’t accomplished. | The New York Times
- Lois’s Duncan’s Down a Dark Hall—a 1970s “parable of the terror of teenage girlhood”—has been updated for 2017, cell phones and all. | Jezebel
- “There are aspects of an inquisition I would really enjoy. The collaborative invention of the world we all wish were true would be one part.” Kathryn Nuernberger on witchcraft, interrogation, and the psyche. | The Paris Review
