TODAY: In 1856, the first installment of Madame Bovary is published. 

• Natalie Zutter recommends some spooky season SFF featuring cannibal sororities, butterfly girl gangs, and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• “Laying someone to rest is the final act of care that leaves a lingering impression, not only on the dead, but on you.” Eden Royce on the importance of funerary details in the face of grief. | Lit Hub Memoir
• What should your kids read this fall? Caroline Carlson recommends 10 new children’s books out in October. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Illustrator Sophie Blackall and author Kate DiCamillo discuss collaborating on the children’s book Lost Evangeline and telling stories within stories. | Lit Hub In Conversation
• Emily J. Orlando explores Taylor Swift’s Pre-Raphaelite era: “Swift seems to be identifying with, and forcefully reimagining, this tragic figure from Victorian history.” | Lit Hub Criticism
• “I owe this book to my mother. It is not about her, and yet she is on every page.” Tamar Shapiro reflects on memory, language, and love in Germany. | Lit Hub Craft
• “Not a night goes by when I don’t forget how one sleeps. My doctor warned me: Insomnia is just another name for depression.” Read from Mia Couto’s novel The Cartographer of Absences, translated by David Brookshaw. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Should college get harder? Joshua Rothman considers knowledge work in the age of AI | The New Yorker
• Jane Stern breaks down the language of apartments. | The Paris Review 
• Matthew Wills looks at the historical context behind Jonathan Swift’s famously scathing satire of the landlord class. | JSTOR Daily
• On Cesare Pavese, Tezer Özlü, and “a hatred of the haute bourgeoisie.” | The Nation
• “The people working on this stuff don’t even seem to believe their own bullshit.” Why AI will never serve democracy. | The Baffler
• Patricia Lockwood and Emmeline Clein talk about writing in the attic, literary tropes, and Jesus’s vagina-shaped wound. | Cultured

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