Lit Hub Daily: September 14, 2023

TODAY: In 1321, Italian poet Dante Alighieri, author of La Commedia (The Divine Comedy),  dies.   

• The season of plenty: Here are the 106 books that critics think you should read this fall. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Ottessa Moshfegh on Dinah Brooke’s 1973 novel: “If it weren’t such a pleasure to read, I’d say that Lord Jim at Home—read by a novelist, like me—was an instrument of torture. It’s that good.” | Lit Hub Criticism

• How Sally Ride became a household name. | Lit Hub Space!

• “Whenever I do creative work, I do it with two 250-gallon tanks of water overhead.” Carol Dunbar on what writing under a water tower taught her about the creative process. | Lit Hub Craft & Advice

• What Olga Ravn is reading now and next, from Fumiko Enchi to Mikhail Bulgakov. | Lit Hub Annotated Nightstand

• “There’s a whiff of desperate masculinity floating through the book, as rank as a Pretoria boys’ locker room.” 5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• “I’ll see a perfectly ordinary suggestion like ‘Possible paraphrase?’ or ‘Who said this?’ and think: Oh, you’re here to kill me! You want me to die?” Daniel Lavery on the pain of being edited. | The Chatner

• “When this outrageous and, frankly, heretical love-and-mustache backstory was introduced in Death on the Nile, I almost threw my popcorn at the screen.” Two Agatha Christie nerds discuss the latest adaptations of her work. | LA Times

• New York City public schools are grappling with the question of how to teach children to read. | New York Magazine

• The ten books nominated for the National Book Award for Translated Literature have been announced, five of which take place in Latin America, with titles from France, Germany, Korea, Syria and the Netherlands also featuring. | The New Yorker

Also on Lit Hub: Andy Borowitz and A. J. Jacobs on living in the age of ignorance • New poetry by India Lena González • Read from Guzel Yakhina’s newly translated novel, A Volga Tale (tr. Polly Gannon)