Lit Hub Daily: October 31, 2019

• On the metaphysical terror of the mask-wearing murderer (and how we’re all masking something, in the end). | Lit Hub
• “To escape from the asylum was, in a sense, to attempt an exit from a woman’s place.” On gothic asylum horror and the 19th-century invention of the madwoman. | Lit Hub
• Snacks! Facials! Corporate feminism? Ruth Madievsky on the creepy dissonance of reading Trick Mirror in a “self-care” book club. | Lit Hub
• Kevin Wilson on learning pronunciation from Seinfeld, and pretending he’s read the classics. | Lit Hub
• Trying to avoid trick-or-treaters? Here are five Halloween audiobooks to help you drown out the doorbell. | Lit Hub
• The Lit Hub staff’s favorite stories of the month, from FAQs about being buried alive to the countercultural influence of Peanuts. | Lit Hub
• “The mood is festive with a subtext of anarchy.” Paul Theroux on the Day of the Dead. | Lit Hub Travel
• “She encourages us to dream, to linger, to flirt, to fall in love, or to at least fantasize that falling in love is possible.” Elaine Sciolino, in praise of the Seine, river of romance. | Lit Hub Travel
• Support your spouse: Percy Shelley’s review of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. | Book Marks
• Parul Sehgal on Carmen Maria Machado’s experimental memoir, Kate Aronoff on Jonathan Safran Foer and the climate sad bois, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• Olivia Rutigliano makes the case for Dracula as a detective novel—and as a sprawling, radical take on the literature of investigations and the paranormal. | CrimeReads
• How are California’s indie booksellers coping with wildfires? | Publishers Weekly
• An interview with Edward Norton on New York, urban planning, and his unconventional film adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. | Smithsonian
• John Cage’s diary is… probably not like your own. | The Paris Review
• Hyderabad, India was once a stronghold of Urdu literature. But as beloved bookstores there close, the picture is beginning to look a little different. | The Siasat Daily
• With apologies to Robert Smith, Charles Baudelaire was “the godfather of goths.” | The Conversation
• “J.R.R. Tolkien created Middle Earth to give his languages somewhere to be spoken”: on the scientific and cultural impact of invented languages, or “conlags.” | Slate
• Mary Ruefle is Vermont’s new Poet Laureate! Good choice, Vermont. | My Champlain Valley

Also on Lit Hub: Hereward Tilton on A Most Rare Compendium, the strangest of manuscripts • Lessons in staying put, from a southern childhood • Read a story from Rudolph Herzog’s collection Ghosts of Berlin (trans. Emma Rault).