Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Fairly quiet on the books news front today (and I would expect it to be this way for awhile for reasons you can probably guess and are feeling yourself. Nervous), so I am clear out my digital pockets with a bunch of stuff I have saved for Today in Books, but don’t have much to say about this to say except: “Huh this is pretty interesting. I bet some people will be into this.”
So consider that appended to each of the links below:
‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’ Sees Israel-Iran Filmmaking Collaboration Bear Fruit Amid Escalating Conflict: ‘Hate Will Not Work’ [Variety]
New Jersey State Senate passes bill intended to halt book bans, protect librarians [New Jersey Monitor]
Halloween Costumes for Writers [Gabino Iglesias on Substack]
AI Slop Is Flooding Medium [Wired]
A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending [The New Yorker]
As a new Smiley novel is published by John le Carré’s son, when does looking after an author’s legacy turn into money-grubbing? [The Times]
What is the Point of Epigraphs, Anyway? [The Walrus]
Siri Hustvedt to write a book about her late husband Paul Auster [The Guardian]
The Names of Library Carts at the Austin Public Library [via Austin Kleon on X]
The Last Gentleman [New York Magazine]
Dog Man Movie Is Here to Swoop In and Rescue the Children’s Book Business [BusinessWeek]
The Novelists Who Nearly Gave Up [The Guardian]
Jeff VanderMeer’s Nightmare Fuel [Esquire]
How Aleksei Navalny’s Prison Diaries Got Published [The New York Times]
Are You a Font Expert? [Norton]
At Stanford, a Change to Creative Writing Feels Personal {The Chronicle of Higher Education]
The Older You Get, the Less Time You Have for Bad Books [LitHub]
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