Happy Halloween!
A bunch of spooky book stuff coming your way. To start us off, LitHub ran a great piece which deals with the significance of the mask in the contemporary horror genre, tracing its origins all the way back to Shakespeare and other dead writers embedded in our collective psyche. Another article on LitHub similarly works with the goal of historicizing contemporary horror tropes, this time coming as an investigation into the links between women, the asylum, and the domestic sphere. ElectricLit ran a great piece listing some of the best writing about horror movies—if you have any interest in catching a couple post-Halloween flicks.
But we’re not done. Believe it or not, the literary community seems to love Halloween. Here are the thirteen of the scariest (and most feminist) witches in modern literature, courtesy of ElectricLit. And here are ten of the most disturbing author photos the people over at LitHub could scrounge up.
Alright, now we’ll pivot. Check out The New Yorker’s really interesting breakdown of Carmen Maria Machado’s new memoir “In the Dream House.” And, per usual, LitHub continued their “ten best” collection, this time in regards to the best essay collections of the decade. You can find it here. And, for fun, check out an interview with everybody’s favorite historian, the late Howard Zinn.
See you next week.