Lit Hub Daily: September 7, 2023

• “Rose can be an angel for us devils, a patron saint for people who don’t do patron saints.” Porochista Khakpour on the unrelatable brilliance of Alison Rose’s Better Than Sane. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Class is in session: Emma Staffaroni considers the new canon of boarding school literature. | Lit Hub Criticism

• What Myriam Gurba is reading now and next, from A Philosophy of Walking to Almanac of the Dead. | Lit Hub Annotated Nightstand

• Rebecca Ackermann reviews the new series adaptation of The Changeling, coming to your screens tomorrow. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• How chef life prepared Brendan Shay Basham for the writing life. | Lit Hub Food

• “I’m just a numbnuts kid who loves to read.” James Ellroy reveals the real reason he writes. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Andrea Long Chu on Zadie Smith, Jonathan Dee on Ariel Dorfman, James Wood on George Eliot, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• Take a look back at Hop on Pop—which turns 60 this year—a book that “changed the way kids read forever.” | Fatherly

• Merve Emre on the function of criticism: “In wit begins criticism, but there is nothing sneering or pushy or pretentious or doctrinaire about it.” | Vinduet

• True tales of terror: Apparently, Stephen King’s wife threatened to divorce him because he played “Mambo No. 5” so many times. | Consequence of Sound

• Sleuths have wondered for years who designed a cover for Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. The mystery has finally been solved. | New York Times

• “Sometimes the feeling of nowhere-ness calls for the ambition of everywhere-ness.” Yiyun Li on rereading Montaigne. | The Atlantic

Also on Lit Hub: How to write novels about real people • How English became a South Asian literary language • Read from Ben Lerner’s new poetry collection, The Lights