Lit Hub Daily: October 25, 2019

• Spooky season is upon us, and these very creepy author photos will send a tingle down your spine(s). | Lit Hub
• “There is something deeply unsettling about a being whose form merges the human with the nonhuman.” How mermaid stories illustrate complex truths about being human. | Lit Hub
• Jana Prikryl and Joanna Kavenna discuss cities as metaphors for mortality, reconfiguring the modern flaneur, and writing in a post-truth age. | Lit Hub
• Read a never-before-published conversation in which Howard Zinn details how FDR forestalled a second American revolution. | Lit Hub
• “For years, women waited for that fateful moment to jump on the mic.” On Debbie D, legendary hip-hop pioneer. | Lit Hub
• Pilgrims, priests, and breaking bread in an alpine monastery: Timothy Egan travels to the Saint Bernard hospice. | Lit Hub
• Their backs to the wall, the Brits went guerrilla: on the “hidden armies” of Britain that battled the Nazis. | Lit Hub
• Here are the winners of this year’s $50,000 Kirkus Prize. | The Hub
• New titles from John le Carré and Jami Attenberg, biographies of Janis Joplin and Thomas Edison, and more all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
• “It was funny, and I’m a big sucker for funny.” How Mary-Kay Wilmers became “Britain’s most influential editor.” | The New York Times
• Do you love Truman Capote and hate sleeping soundly? Good news: the Kansas farmhouse where the Clutter family was murdered is for sale. | SF Gate
• Who ya gonna call? Apparently Dame Judi Dench. The actress, who is president of the Brontë Society, backed the Brontë Parsonage Museum’s bid for a book of stories Charlotte Brontë wrote when she was 14. The manuscript is worth at least £650,000. | BBC
• Sorry, Goldfinch, the first reviews for Greta Gerwig’s film adaptation of Little Women are in. They’re glowing, to say the least. | IndieWire
• Herman Melville had a little-known penchant for bowling, and he was actually pretty good at it. | New York Review of Books
• Why have we never found Shakespeare’s manuscripts? Stuart Kells has spent years investigating. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: “This is not black history; this is our history”: Steve Luxenberg talks to Roxanne Coady on Just the Right Book • The late Glenn O’Brien on the stigma of a luxurious writing life • On Germany’s attempt to hide art stolen by Nazis • Read a story by Namwali Serpell from the current issue Freeman’s.