Here are a couple Halloween-related essays from the good people at The Literary Hub: This fascinating literary history of witches by Jess Bergman, and this piece by Tobias Carroll on non-fiction writers crossing the supernatural line between fantasy and reality.
Scaring Men
Digital Love
Jonathan Franzen's 2011 Kenyon commencement speech, published this weekend in the New York Times, covers love, consumerism, and narcissism in the digital age. If you're concerned with critical reception, looks like you're not a creator of "serious art and literature," in Franzen's eyes.
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“Travel well”
Recommended Reading: this new Eileen Myles poem in the latest issue of Poetry.
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Brainy Summer Reading
The Atlantic has a great list up: "10 Essential Books for Thought-Provoking Summer Reading," including The Late American Novel.
And in This Corner, Weighing in at 900 Pages…
The eagle-eyed Scott Esposito alerts us to a forthcoming 900-page collection of short stories by Stephen Dixon. One hopes Fantagraphics has beefed up its copy-editing department since its last fictional behemoth, Alexander Theroux's Laura Warholic.
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MetaFilter Asks
MetaFilter asks, what's one book that everyone should read?
Rachel Kushner and the Costa Concordia
Recommended reading: Rachel Kushner writes about the Costa Concordia disaster, cruise ships in general, and her own short-lived "aspiration to spend time at sea as requisite literary training" for The London Review of Books.
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