Lit Hub Daily: November 30, 2023

• Hot tip for handling the holidays: read horror. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Turns out, Elvis set the stage for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. | Lit Hub Music

• On Constantine Simonides, one of history’s great manuscript forgers. | Lit Hub

• “Of course, no one ever makes it out alive. That’s just the way things are.” Kate Christensen on what Albert Camus’s The Stranger says about our contemporary anxieties. | Lit Hub

• Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables, Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra, and Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day all feature among November’s best reviewed books. | Book Marks

• Valeria Luiselli considers Douglas J. Weatherford’s new translation of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, the novel that inspired Gabriel García Márquez to begin One Hundred Years of Solitude. | The New York Times

• What to do when the online haters come for you. | Brevity Blog

• “I felt myself seesawing between gratitude for my life and preoccupation with the void.” Evan Grillon chronicles his experience of open heart surgery. | Dirt

• Just another reason to protect librarians at all costs: They helped defeat the Nazis. | JSTOR Daily

• “The postcard is an object as much as a message, and sending one, for Bishop, was like giving a gift.” Langdon Hammer on Elizabeth Bishop’s postcards. | The Paris Review

Also on Lit Hub: The 10 best book covers of November • Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore on the exploitation of Basquiat • Read Mahmoud Shukair’s story “A Letter To Kofi Annan” (tr. Nariman Youssef)