Part of J K Rowling’s pitch to publishers for Harry Potter has been put on display in the new British Library exhibition. Meanwhile, props for the pun to the author of this piece on the importance of Harry Potter to the publishing industry.
Philip Pullman’s swearwords will enrich young readers’ lives, argues Emma Byrne.
MTV has 13 suggestions for scary books this Halloween.
The Telegraph makes a good argument for taking a reading week as an adult.
The covers of the Man Booker Prize shortlisted novels look very different on each side of the Pond. On Book Riot, you can vote for your favourite version of each.
Excerpted on The Pool this week is Susie Boyt’s Love & Fame, which is out next week.
The Bookseller has the first photos of the new Blackwell’s in Oxford’s Westgate Shopping Centre.
On Guardian Books, Kaite Welsh argues Tom Hanks ‘s writing in Uncommon Type is yet another sad example of how men write women.
Sinead Morrissey’s poetry collection On Balance “keeps extending itself and that shares many of the satisfactions of fiction, memoir and history”, says Kate Kellaway.
Shopping suggestions
Thinking about Christmas shopping? Female First has ten reasons why rare books make a great gift.
Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood has a new book and it’s expected to do very well.
Podcasts
The New Statesman’s Srsly podcast discusses La Belle Sauvage.
On Australia’s Better Words podcast, UK blogger extraordinaire Lucy Powrie speaks about her love for the classics as well as the contemporary.
On The Joined Up Writing Podcast, William Shaw discusses his Breen and Tozer series of novels set in late ’60s London. Book Blogger Katherine Sunderland reviews Bad Sister by Sam Carrington.
On the London Review Bookshop Podcast, playwright and translator Anne Carson performs Lecture on the History of Skywriting, by Laurie Anderson, alongside Robert Currie and Ben Whishaw.
On this week’s Guardian Books Podcast, Sian speaks to Andrew Michael Hurley,who is back after his succesful first novel The Loney with Devil’s Day: a similarly spooky novel that follows a young man and his new wife as they return to his childhood home. Then Claire joins Sian in the studio, where they discuss their favourite horror novels, eerie tales and ghost stories.
The Brit Lit Blog 