TODAY: In 1930, Harold Pinter is born.
- “What these readers are expressing is not so uncommon: the fear of indirect contact. They can’t bear to think that their beloved author has passed through the filter of some other being.” Todd Portnowitz on the translating the stories in Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection. | Lit Hub On Translation
- Rumaan Alam wants you to read Helen Garner’s The Children’s Back, “a story about how life happens to all of us.” | Lit Hub Literary Criticism
- “I’ll always have you to talk to about the books I read.” Paul Yoon in conversation with his wife, Laura van den Berg, on craft, story architecture, and the person he needed to become to finish his new book. | Lit Hub In Conversation
- “‘Ye olde’ is in fact a pseudo-archaic term; no one ever said ‘ye olde’ except in imitation of an imagined speech of the distant past.” Hana Videen on Chaucer, Hamlet, and the evolution of Middle and Old English. | Lit Hub History
- As you prepare your Halloween costumes, check out one of the 25 new titles on sale today. | Lit Hub
- “What I think the Academy meant is that, across his forty-odd plays, his novels, his essays, and his children’s books, what is unsayable—the absolute depths of abandonment, shame, love, and grace—is felt without needing to be named, surpassing the mere arrangement of words on a page.” Merve Emre on newly crowned Nobel Prize laureate Jon Fosse and the art of what can’t be named. | The New Yorker
- “Last month the biggest drug raid in Irish history had been carried out by… William Butler Yeats.” Did you know the Irish navy has named its warships after Irish writers for the past decade? | The Irish Times, New York Times
- Daniel Clowes, author of Ghost World, on his new graphic novel, “his most personal work yet.”| Vanity Fair
- What are the best descriptions of loneliness in literature? Sophie Ratcliffe makes some suggestions that describe “a painful absence all the time.” | The Guardian
- An interview with Myronn Hardy. | Poets.org
Also on Lit Hub: Why Sergey Gandlevsky’s Russian protest poems still matter now • A lost story from Terry Pratchett
