• This is a neat idea: Alexander Chee is taking over the Hugo House's Instagram feed this week to provide teasers of the story he'll be reading at the House's Literary Series event this Friday.

• Happy Halloween! This has to be the best literary Halloween tweet of the year:

I just passed a young woman wearing a sombrero, would be so dope if her costume was "lionel shriver"

— Rumaan Alam (@Rumaan) October 31, 2016

• Emily St. John Mandel wrote a great piece on Five Thirty Eight about the current craze of books with the word "Girl" in the title. It's packed with charts about the age of the supposed "girls" in the title — they're mostly women — and the mortality rates of the titular girls.

• This essay by Tiffany Martínez deserves more attention. Why would a college professor tell a student — any student — that they're not allowed to use a word?

On the second page the professor circled the word “hence” and wrote in between the typed lines “This is not your word.” The word “not” was underlined. Twice. My professor assumed someone like me would never use language like that. As I stood in the front of the class while a professor challenged my intelligence I could just imagine them reading my paper in their home thinking could someone like her write something like this?

• The one and a half million people who live in the Bronx will soon no longer have a general interest bookstore of their own. The last bookstore in the Bronx — a Barnes & Noble — will be closing soon.

• I've written twice about how much I enjoyed novelist Chelsea Cain's Mockingbird series. Last week, Cain was chased off Twitter by comic book fans who disliked the fact that a cover of the last issue of the series featured Mockinbird wearing a t-shirt that read "ASK ME ABOUT MY FEMINIST AGENDA." Heidi MacDonald at the Beat wrote a good piece about the story. And of course, those idiot trolls shot themselves in the foot: the first collected volume of Cain's Mockingbird series is now a bestseller. Comics fans who align themselves on anti-diversity crusades are on the wrong side of history. The future of comics is female and diverse. We side with Cain and with the feminist agenda.