TODAY: In 1925, Gore Vidal is born.
- “Just why The Kite Runner has become so popular isn’t entirely clear to me… but there is a universality to this tale of a boy who feels inadequate and longs for his father’s love.” Khaled Hosseini reflects on the 20th anniversary of his novel, The Kite Runner. | Lit Hub Craft
- Jonathan Russell Clark on the spate of recent writer documentaries and the films about Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, and Tom Wolfe. | Lit Hub Film & TV
- How Ukrainian choreographer Alexei Ratmansky brought a new kind of ballet to America. | Lit Hub Dance
- “What is family for broke folks? How does being broke break a family?” Michelle Tea on poverty and the American family. | Lit Hub Politics
- What the WGA’s historic contract means for all writers in the fight against generative AI. | Lit Hub Film & TV
- Welcome to October: Here are 27 new books publishing today. | The Hub
- On Mexico’s radical, forgotten experiment with drug legalization in the 1930s. | The Dial
- Syrian author, poet, and screenwriter Khaled Khalifa, whose novels set in Aleppo memorialized a city ruined by civil war, has died aged 59. | The Guardian
- A visit to the Andover Bookstore, the oldest bookstore in the United States, established in 1809, the same year Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin and Edgar Allan Poe were all born. | MassLive
- “Ernest Hemingway had called her ‘his favorite living writer’ — but success eluded…when she died in 1965, most of her books were out of print. In the decades since then she has become a cult figure.” Powell was buried in a potter’s field in the Bronx. Now some of her admirers are thinking about how to commemorate her. | New York Times
- “The amount of scholarship on Homer and his works can be daunting: the field is so broad, rich, and yes, old.” An introductory reading list to Homer. | JSTOR Daily
- Erin Sommers on Lorrie Moore’s bad jokes which keep us going amid the heartbreak and loss of her fiction. | The Nation
