TODAY: In 1936, Harriet Monroe, founding publisher and longtime editor of Poetry, dies.

• During the season of big books, how do you choose one to read? With a flowchart, obviously. | Lit Hub
• Ed Simon explores the limits of language to understand why “pain makes poor poets out of all of us.” | Lit Hub Criticism
• Bilal Urick considers Fady Joudah’s Exhibit G, a “poetic meditation on language and time, the basic structural forces of life, stripped of stability under genocide.” | Lit Hub Criticism
• Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz chronicles the story of the actual first shot fired in the American Civil War. | Lit Hub History
• Harry Levov considers the promise of effective altruism, which, despite its best efforts, “always seems to catch audiences on the wrong foot.” | The Point
• Napster is back, and it’s…developing AI teachers for classrooms? | Wired
• Film historian Karina Longworth looks at the literature of Hollywood. | Cultured
• Nancy Foley remembers her cross-generational friendship with the late painter Robert Kabak, or as she calls him, Bob. | Oldster
• John Hay looks at The Sea Beast, the earliest cinematic adaptation of Moby-Dick. | The Paris Review
• James Young Phillips, author of the largely forgotten 1940 novel The Inheritors, “was compared by prominent critics to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway”—and thanks to a re-issue the book is getting a second chance to find its audience. | Texas Monthly
• “Her life is like her work in at least one respect: it is far more difficult to dismiss once you’ve actually engaged with it.” Casey Cep profiles Barbara Kingsolver. | The New Yorker
• David Grundy remembers J.H. Prynne, whose poetry encompassed political inquiry, unexpected slapstick, and the “intentionally, genuinely weird.” | Poetry
• Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo remembers the “lucidity, courage, and a high degree of political literacy” of the late Fredric Jameson. | Public Books
• Grace Glass remembers the “unexorcisable” Annie Dillard. | n+1
• Christopher Rice explores how his mother channeled grief while writing Interview With the Vampire. | The New York Times
• Jamieson Webster explores a psychoanalytic history of the sea: “Poor Freud. The great explorer of the unconscious could find no feeling for that oceanic depth.” | Broadcast
• Ed Simon considers The Corrections—”a novel of 2026 as well as of 2001”—at 25. | The Hedgehog Review
• Today in huh?, Sea World’s doing romantasy for Halloween, and they’re making it horny. | Wired
• Anca L. Szilágyi praises garlic, the “poor man’s spice.” | Orion

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