TODAY: In 1876, American writer Natalie Clifford Barney is born. She ran a salon at Parisian home for more than 60 years, promoting women’s writing through her “Women’s Academy” (L’Académie des Femmes) which she began in response to the all-male French Academy.
- “The horror of the Great War consumed the lives of soldiers and civilians alike; it sought them out in their sleep, their imagination, and, bizarrely, in their entertainments.” How horror changed after WWI. | Lit Hub
- “There is no tradition of horror or weird writing in Spanish.” Mariana Enriquez on religion, superstition, and the dark side of writing as an Argentinian. | Lit Hub
- (Trick-or-)treat yourself to two creepy tales: new ghost stories by Max Porter and Kamila Shamsie. | Lit Hub
- Mall zombies, property-holding vampires, and braaaaains (to each according to his need): horror in capitalism’s wake. | Lit Hub. | Lit Hub
- The warming earth is waking up dormant—and deadly—diseases: Jeff Nesbit on the “warning flare” of animal die-offs. | Lit Hub
- From Thomas Harris, to Lauren Beukes, to Victor Lavalle, Max Booth III guides us through the world of horror/crime crossovers. | CrimeReads
- This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Laura Spence-Ash on Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Rigoberto González. | Book Marks
- Judaism “was something attached to their bodies and expressed through one’s relationship to land, labour and resources”: On the 19th-century revolution in European Jewish thought. | Aeon
- Philosopher and classicist Martha Nussbaum receives the $1 million Berggruen Prize. | The New York Times
- Forget the book under the covers—these days, the kids are reading text message-based horror stories online. | WIRED
- So, a Russian scientist in Antarctica stabbed his colleague . . . because he wouldn’t stop telling him the endings to books. | Mirror UK
- “Delight in what [you] fear” and more invaluable pieces of writing advice from Shirley Jackson. | Melville House
- The universal harm caused by restricting books for incarcerated people. | Electric Lit
- “A Wizard of Earthsea was riveting, yet conventional—except in the important way that its main characters quietly subverted one of British and American fantasy’s most notable tropes.” Gabrielle Bellot on how Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic challenged racist (but not sexist) genre conventions. | Tor
Also on Lit Hub: Reading Across America: the longest running series in Queens. • October Staff Favorites. • Interviews National Book Award in Translated Literature finalists Domenico Starnone & Jhuma Lahiri and Olga Tokarczuk & Jennifer Croft.
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