TODAY: In 1935, biographer Robert Caro is born.
- Somebody had to do it: 50 Draculas, ranked. | Lit Hub
- “How many more fucking bodies have to pile up?” Lily Wachowski on confronting fascism at the ballot box… and in the streets. | Lit Hub
- “We have the same thing to be afraid of: the demon in men’s minds which prompts hatred and anger and fear.” Shirley Jackson, soothing as ever, in a letter to a young reader. | Lit Hub
- “As much as nature is ‘so full of good things,’ it is also full of danger and malice, uncertainty and terror.” Tyler Malone explores the dark, cinematic world of eco-horror. | Lit Hub
- “The first time I hexed a major national leader, I wasn’t sure how I, a more feel-good sort of mystic, felt about ritual curses.” Lucile Scott on pandemic weddings and rules for witches. | Lit Hub
- “Speculative literature has much to teach us about borders, power, fear, anger, and our options for responding to all of them.” M. Dressler on what ghost stories mean in 2020. | Lit Hub
- Ghosts, demons, and depression: Claire Cronin on writers and their many hauntings. | Lit Hub
- “From a bone lover’s perspective, some currently available skeleton costumes for Halloween distort nature almost as much as Picasso’s renditions.” Who among us does not love a good bone. | Lit Hub
- “The written word is magical because it is yet to be performed.” In which Jenny Hval and Alexandra Kleeman may or may not talk about Norwegian death metal. | Lit Hub
- “In France, even a century later, to see those who had the audacity to dare turned into an image of those who had the shrewdness to submit feels like a defeat.” On the very French fight over moving Rimbaud and Verlaine into the Pantheon. | The New Yorker
- “I found it difficult not to wonder: What exactly had she been afraid of?” Valeria Luiselli on the photographs of Dorothea Lange. | NYRB
- Alice Bolin on The Vow and NXIVM, “a distillation of all the failures and lies of corporate feminism.” | The Paris Review
- The call to diversify the publishing industry was made loudly and clearly earlier this summer. What are insiders doing to make sure this isn’t just a fad? | The New York Times
- There’s an argument to be made that three “business” books in particular have made the world worse off: Reengineering the Corporation (1994), The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), and Atlas Shrugged (1957). | Inc
- This small children’s bookstore had been open for less than a year when the pandemic began. Here’s how they’ve kept the business going. | Democrat & Chronicle
