TODAY: In 1914, Dylan Thomas is born.
- “The growing phenomenon of Marilyn Monroe did not escape Richard Avedon’s reading of the cultural moment.” When a film icon meets a legendary photographer. | Lit Hub Photography
- “You face a lot of rejection. Why wouldn’t you be depressed?” Hilary Mantel on how writers learn to trust themselves. | Lit Hub
- “I wouldn’t be alive today without writing. I know that. And again writing is a way to say so many things you aren’t able to say always.” Peter Mishler talks to the poet Pamela Sneed. | Lit Hub Poetry
- “In a century filled with wars, the Cuban missile crisis came close to producing the most horrifying war of all.” What we still don’t know about that fateful week. | Lit Hub History
- “The need to prevent violence escalating is at the heart of all religions and most cultural systems.” A conversation between Paul Kingsnorth and Ellie Robins. | Lit Hub
- “At a dinner for the Time staff, Henry Luce told his guests, ‘I could fire any of you. . . . But I don’t know anyone who can fire me.’” So, you want to work in magazines? | Lit Hub Biography
- Pass the (end) time(s) reading 50 of the best apocalypse novels ever written (that will someday crumble into so much dust in the great abandoned libraries of the distant future). | Lit Hub
- “A great number think the pandemic is a liberal hoax that was sent by China to try to destroy us.” Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, calling it like they see it. | Lit Hub Politics
- “Goodnight Moon affirms connection, solidarity, love. At the same time, the great green room is a space haunted by the potential of loss.” Kate Bernheimer on the melancholy at the heart of a beloved children’s classic. | Lit Hub
- Scott James recommends five books to help us understand the rise of Trump that have nothing to do with Trump, from A Civil Action to Where the Crawdads Sing. | Book Marks
- The best reviewed history and politics books, October edition. | Lit Hub, Book Marks
- Instead of picking a new release for her book club this month, Oprah has picked seven—all books she turns to for “comfort, beauty, inspiration, reassurance,” from Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. | O
- “When I think back to those early conversations, it’s hard to deny my overconfidence.” Read an excerpt from President Obama’s intensely anticipated memoir. | The New Yorker
- “So, here we are, in this unspeakable mess . . . and we know very well that things can get worse. But if things could only get worse, we would all have been dead millennia ago.” Deborah Eisenberg would like you to vote. | NYRB
- “They wrote to feed the conveyor belt of hooks that ran along the ceiling, from the editor to the foreman to the typographer.” On the 19th-century world of New York City journalism. | The Paris Review
- “Women can’t win in literature. It’s no different from other forms of public life.” Anna Bruno on writing and empathy. | Guernica
- A London bookshop is running a fun competition that one person anywhere in the world can win. The winner will receive one free book every month for the rest of their life. | My London
- Tobias Carroll on conspiracies and the uncanny “cryptids” in the work of Colin Dickey. | InsideHook
