Lit Hub Daily: November 1, 2021

• Where are all the plain female protagonists? Lucinda Rosenfeld considers the literary trope of the “great beauty.” | Lit Hub Criticism

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• Stuart Jeffries on Netflix’s notorious binge culture, the illusion of choice… and how David Foster Wallace predicted it all. | Lit Hub TV

• “Being awarded a house is both validating and terrifying, as well as several other emotions I find myself unable to affix.” Anne Elizabeth Moore on the cost of winning a “free house” in Detroit. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Muriel Barbery recommends letting form guide your story. | Lit Hub Craft

• Paul Auster on one of the finest war stories in American literature, “a four-page 60-yard dash without a single misstep or stumble along the way.” | Lit Hub

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• “I cried all those years not because I ached for motherhood but because I feared regret.” Teresa K. Miller on being no one’s mother. | Lit Hub

• How Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jane Addams—at “a national convention unlike America had ever witnessed”—helped launch the Progressive party. | Lit Hub History

• Ski bums, Jazz Age madams, and postwar bohemians all feature among November’s new and noteworthy nonfiction. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Watch Christina Quarles and Maggie Nelson in conversation. | Bookforum

• Photographer Matt McClain on the legacy of Edgar Allan Poe and his connection to Baltimore. | The Washington Post

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• On the enduring appeal of Dune. | The New Yorker

• One positive outcome of the latest absurd attempt to ban Beloved in schools: the book’s sales are through the roof. | Quartz

• Emma Specter considers the joys of tandem reading. | Vogue

• Alison Flood looks at the rebound of the horror genre and the writers pushing it to new places. | The Guardian

• Petra Mayer of NPR Books shares her favorite thrilling reads. | WBUR

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Also on Lit Hub: Virtual book events to stream in November • A poem by Amanda Moore • Read a story by Lana Bastašić (tr. Celia Hawkesworth) in Freeman’s