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Are you dressing up in a costume today? If you’re still figuring things out, the internet has a plethora of ideas for bibliophiles.

We’ve shared several sources to spur up your imagination. Happy Halloween!

BuzzFeed articles: “21 Children’s Book Characters Born To Be Halloween Costumes” and “17 Awesome Literary Halloween Costumes.”

Imagination Soup articles: “60 Favorite Book Character Costumes” and “Picture Book Character Costumes for Halloween.”

Pinterest boards: “Cherry Hill Public Library’s Literary Costumes for Halloween” and “Wichita Public Library’s Literary Costumes.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Are you looking for more places to read or write about literary criticism? Today on the Morning Media Menu, we explored The Los Angeles Review of Books, a growing online journal on the West Coast.

Our guest was founding editor Tom Lutz, explaining how the publication has grown over the last year. He also talked about how readers can support the new online magazine and how writers can pitch story ideas to the book review.

Press play below to listen to the interview. Lutz explained how writers can pitch the new journal: “It begins with a pitch from a critic. That pitch can go to this address: pitches [at] lareviewofbooks [dot] org. We look at everything that comes in. A lot of our best stuff comes from people I didn’t know until we started working with them.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Inspired by his 12-year-old son’s advice, University of British Columbia psychologist Alan Kingstone used the beloved Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual in an experiment.

According to Discover’s Not Exactly Rocket Science blog, the psychologist was studying why people “automatically look where other people are looking,” trying to figure out if we automatically follow other people’s eyes or if we orient on the middle of people’s faces. The D & D monster manual offered a variety of images to test how we see. Check it out:

He thought it would be easy to discriminate between the two ideas: just use the Monster Manual. This book will be delightfully familiar to a certain brand of geek. It’s the Bible of fictional beasties that accompanied the popular dice-rolling role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Regularly updated, it bursts with great visuals and bizarrely detailed accounts of unnatural history. It has differently coloured dragons, undead, beholders … Levy knew that the Manual contained many nightmarish monsters whose eyes are not on their faces. If people still looked at the eyes of these creatures, it would answer the question.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

What is the worst book you’ve ever read?

Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic and author Michael Dirda held an epic “Ask Me Anything” interview at Reddit, fielding questions online from readers about self-publishing, Amazon and the worst books he ever reviewed.

At one point, he talked about the worst book he’d ever read. Check it out: “Judith Krantz‘s Dazzle. Even the sex in the book was boilerplate, a totally meretricious work. John Sutherland–a distinguished English authority on the novel and the best seller–once included Dazzle in his list of the 25 worst novels of the century.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The New Yorker has relaunched its literary blog with a new name and logo: Page-Turner.

The new blog will expand the work of the Book Bench, the magazine’s old books site. “Daily essays will be the blog’s mainstay, with books as an anchor for wide-ranging cultural comment,” explained the introductory post.

Check it out: “Our first day features an essay by Salman Rushdie on the spectre of censorship; a dissenting view on the immortality of “Death of a Salesman,” by Giles Harvey; Mary Norris on the subtle marvellousness of the medieval thorn; and Nick Thompson on the risks of the running life. Check back for interviews with fiction writers, staff reading lists, literary Shouts & Murmurs, cool-headed rants, barely checked enthusiasms, good-natured persiflage, and, with luck, lots of soft owls flying over the lane.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Over at Commentary, you can find a list of the American writers ranked by the amount of scholarly writing they have generated over the last 25 years. Henry James leads the list–scholars have written 3,188 pieces about his work.

Many of these writers have free eBooks available online. We’ve created a list below linking to free digital book editions of works by these writers.

Here’s more about the list: “Over the past 25 years, Henry James has been the top-ranked American writer, according to the latest MLA International Bibliography. More than 3,000 pieces of scholarship have been devoted to him in whole or part since 1987 … Here are the top American writers as determined by the amount of scholarship on each. In brackets is the rise or fall of each writer when compared to his or her ranking since 1947.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Over at Commentary, you can find a list of the American writers ranked by the amount of scholarly writing they have generated over the last 25 years. Henry James leads the list–scholars have written 3,188 pieces about his work.

Many of these writers have free eBooks available online. We’ve created a list below linking to free digital book editions of works by these writers.

Here’s more about the list: “Over the past 25 years, Henry James has been the top-ranked American writer, according to the latest MLA International Bibliography. More than 3,000 pieces of scholarship have been devoted to him in whole or part since 1987 … Here are the top American writers as determined by the amount of scholarship on each. In brackets is the rise or fall of each writer when compared to his or her ranking since 1947.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Today Slate launched a monthly feature, the Slate Book Review. The New York Times has more details.

Check it out: “The first weekend of every month, the Slate Book Review will take over Slate’s home page, delivering reviews of the newest fiction and nonfiction; essays on reading, writing, and the great (and terrible) books of years gone by; author interviews; videos and podcasts; and much more. We’re proud to bring together Slatesters whose work you know and love with great new writers who’ve never appeared in our magazine before, all in one smart, essential package.”

As of this writing, you can read Allison Benedikt on What To Expect When You’re Expecting and Wesley Morris on “a poet’s investigation of blackness in American culture.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Last night Adam Mars-Jones won the Hatchet Job of the Year award, celebrated for writing the “angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review published in a newspaper or magazine in 2011.”

Follow this link to read Mars-Jones’ scathing review of By Nightfall that earned a golden hatchet and “a year’s supply of potted shrimp.” British journalists Rachel Johnson, Suzi Feay, Sam Leith and D.J. Taylor judged the competition. At this link, you can read all the shortlisted Hatchet Job of the Year reviews.

Leith explained why they chose the review: “Mars-Jones’s review of Michael Cunningham had everything a reader could hope for in a hostile review. It was at once erudite, attentive, killingly fair-minded and viciously funny … Every one of his zingers – ‘like tin-cans tied to a tricycle;’ ‘it seems to be the prestige of the modernists he admires, rather than their stringency;’ ‘that’s not an epiphany, that’s a postcard’ – is earned by the argument it arises from. By the end of it Cunningham’s reputation is, well, prone.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Last night Adam Mars-Jones won the Hatchet Job of the Year award, celebrated for writing the “angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review published in a newspaper or magazine in 2011.”

Follow this link to read Mars-Jones’ scathing review of By Nightfall that earned a golden hatchet and “a year’s supply of potted shrimp.” British journalists Rachel Johnson, Suzi Feay, Sam Leith and D.J. Taylor judged the competition. At this link, you can read all the shortlisted Hatchet Job of the Year reviews.

Leith explained why they chose the review: “Mars-Jones’s review of Michael Cunningham had everything a reader could hope for in a hostile review. It was at once erudite, attentive, killingly fair-minded and viciously funny … Every one of his zingers – ‘like tin-cans tied to a tricycle;’ ‘it seems to be the prestige of the modernists he admires, rather than their stringency;’ ‘that’s not an epiphany, that’s a postcard’ – is earned by the argument it arises from. By the end of it Cunningham’s reputation is, well, prone.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Do negative reviews stop people from reading your books? Over at her blog, novelist Shiloh Walker disputed that claim in a passionate essay.

Check it out: “That negative review isn’t going to kill your career. Will it stop a few people from buying your book? Possibly–because that book may not be right for them. And FYI, one of the rants lately was that negative reviews discouraged people from reading … readers aren’t discouraged by ‘bad’ reviews. And guess what–that negative review may be the very thing that entices another reader to buy your book.”

We were so inspired by her work that we checked negative reviews of ten authors at Amazon–counting the massive amount of one-star reviews received by bestselling authors. Twilight topped the list with 669 one-star reviews. Read this list before you complain about your next bad review.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Do negative reviews stop people from reading your books? Over at her blog, novelist Shiloh Walker disputed that claim in a passionate essay.

Check it out: “That negative review isn’t going to kill your career. Will it stop a few people from buying your book? Possibly–because that book may not be right for them. And FYI, one of the rants lately was that negative reviews discouraged people from reading … readers aren’t discouraged by ‘bad’ reviews. And guess what–that negative review may be the very thing that entices another reader to buy your book.”

We were so inspired by her work that we checked negative reviews of ten authors at Amazon–counting the massive amount of one-star reviews received by bestselling authors. Twilight topped the list with 669 one-star reviews. Read this list before you complain about your next bad review.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

John Williams, the editor of The Second Pass book review site, has been hired as a web producer at The New York Times books section.

This morning, he tweeted the news: “couldn’t be more thrilled to be the new web producer for the books section of the New York Times.”

Here’s more about the new producer: “Williams, lives in Brooklyn, NY. From 2001-2007, he worked in the editorial department at HarperCollins. Before that, he spent time as a journalist in Texas and an editorial intern at Harper’s Magazine. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Slate, McSweeney’s, Stop Smiling, the Barnes & Noble Review, the Austin American-Statesman, the Dallas Morning News, and other publications.” (Via Sarah Weinman)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

As Halloween nears, it’s time for our annual feature on literary costume ideas. The blogosphere was bursting with ideas last year, but we’d love to hear more suggestions–especially literary costumes for this GalleyCat editor’s one-year-old baby…

Share all your ideas at the #literarycostumes hastag created by Random House. 

Adventurous Writer pointed us toward a brilliant Curious George Man in the Yellow Hat costume (pictured, via).

The Book Bench set up a Flickr page collecting the best photos of literary Halloween costumes.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The National Book Award finalists were unveiled yesterday and many readers instantly started drawing lists of influential authors who didn’t make the list. Over at Salon, Laura Miller took the most dramatic stance in her essay “How the National Book Awards made themselves irrelevant.”

She cited four popular novels that the judges passed over: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, State of Wonder by Ann Patchett and The Submission by Amy Waldman.

Here’s more from the essay: “the National Book Award in fiction, more than any other American literary prize, illustrates the ever-broadening cultural gap between the literary community and the reading public. The former believes that everyone reads as much as they do and that they still have the authority to shape readers’ tastes, while the latter increasingly suspects that it’s being served the literary equivalent of spinach. Like the Newbery Medal for children’s literature, awarded by librarians, the NBA has come to indicate a book that somebody else thinks you ought to read, whether you like it or not.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Yesterday a pulp fiction loving hacker broke into the Trinity College Dublin website, adding a new professor to the school–Conan the Barbarian.

The post has since been removed, but the Guardian pointed us to a cached version of the page that will immortalize Conan’s brief tenure at Trinity College.

Here’s more from the fake entry: “He completed his PhD, entitled ‘To Hear The Lamentation of Their Women: Constructions of Masculinity in Contemporary Zamoran Literature’ at UCD and was appointed to the School of English in 2006, after successfully decapitating his predecessor during a bloody battle which will long be remembered in legend and song. In 2011/12, he will be teaching on the following courses: ‘The Relevance of Crom in the Modern World,’ ‘Theories of Literature,’ ‘Vengeance for Beginners,’ ‘Deciphering the Riddle of Steel’ and ‘D.H. Lawrence.’ He strongly objects to the terms of the Croke Park agreement and the current trend for remaking 1980s films that he believes were perfectly good enough in the first place.” (Image via, link via)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Television critic Nancy Franklin will no longer serve as the TV critic at The New Yorker.

She broke the story on Twitter: “Some news: I’m leaving my job as The New Yorker’s TV critic. Happy to have had, for 13 yrs, the best job ever, and happy to be giving it up.”

Franklin had worked at the magazine since 1978. She served as an editorial assistant and fact checker before becoming the nonfiction editor in 1985. She began writing for the magazine in 1995 with the feature, “How Did I Get Here?” (Via Motoko Rich)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Arthur Whitney Ellsworth, the first publisher of The New York Review of Books, has passed away. He was 75 years old.

Ellsworth received his undergraduate education at Harvard University. Following six months of military service, he began his career in publishing at The Atlantic Monthly. After twenty-five years at The New York Review of Books, Ellsworth went on to work for Lakeville Journal Company and Amnesty International USA.

Here’s more from The New York Times: “As publisher of The New York Review of Books, Mr. Ellsworth expanded the journal’s presence abroad by publishing a British edition, distributed by a London cabdriver with whom he struck up an acquaintance. In 1979, taking advantage of a strike that halted publication of The Times Literary Supplement, he helped create The London Review of Books, published for its first six months as an insert in The New York Review of Books.” (via Publisher’s Weekly)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In an article at Utah’s KSL.com,  psychologist and author Dr. Juli Slattery compared romance novels to pornography. As the article stirred controversy on Twitter, author Jason Pinter started a satirical “romance kills” hashtag (examples follow below).

Here is an excerpt from the article: “Men are very visual, and viewing pornography produces a euphoric drug in the body. This drug is the reason pornography becomes addictive. When the natural high wears off, a man will crash and feel depressed (as happens with any drug) and crave another hit. Women are more stimulated by romance than sex, so when they read romantic stories (and they don’t have to be explicit to work) they can experience the same addicting chemical release as men do.”

What do you think? The article explored Slattery’s book, Finding the Hero in your Husband, ultimately offering tips for avoiding romance novel addiction. Step one was simple: “commit to stop reading any books that are contributing to this problem.” (Image via)

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While the Los Angeles Review of Books won’t officially launch until late 2011, the literary criticism publication unveiled a preview site today.

The site opened with “The Death of the Book” by Ben Ehrenreich. The site will be updated with daily content, including Geoff Nicholson writing about silent film star Buster Keaton, Jane Smiley exploring the work of novelist and biographer Nancy Mitford, and Jefferson Hunter writing about private detective novelist Ross Macdonald and oil spills.

Here’s more about the new site: “The complete Los Angeles Review of Books site, launching in late 2011, will be much more complex and multidimensional, featuring reviews and essays, reader discussion forums, video of author interviews and events, an IMDB style archival reference database for the book world, and much more, taking full advantage of the latest web technologies. Reviews of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, memoir, philosophy, art, science fiction, young adult, children’s and more, will have multiple links leading through the site, allowing readers to follow their inclinations into new territories, finding new books, authors, and genres.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

For a limited time, The New Yorker will give Facebook fans free access to a Jonathan Franzen essay about his relationship with the late David Foster Wallace. Follow this link to access the essay.

Here’s an excerpt: “The people who knew David least well are most likely to speak of him in saintly terms. What makes this especially strange is the near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love. Close loving relationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning, have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe.”

What do you think about the provocative essay? Last week, we found a number of tax tips hidden inside The Pale King–Wallace’s unfinished novel about the lives of IRS agents.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In a Psychology Today essay, Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother’s Compulsive Hoarding author Jessie Sholl criticized Mark Medley‘s “Confessions of a Book Hoarder” essay as “flippant and smirky.”

Sholl (pictured, via) wrote about how we misuse the term “hoarder” in popular culture–disrespecting people who suffer from  the mental disorder. What do you think?

Sholl explained: “Just because you have a lot of books, that doesn’t mean you’re a bibliomaniac. Can you walk through the room in which your books are stored? Have you depleted any of your life savings on these books? … Since my memoir came out, numerous people have confessed to me that they think they’re hoarders, too … you might have packed bookcases and, yes, too many books, but that doesn’t mean you’re a book hoarder.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

After its latest revision, the Oxford English Dictionary now includes 45,437 new words and meanings–including tinfoil hat, singledom, and dot bomb.

The new update also includes words from the world of texting: OMG and LOL, FYI. They also added the all-important “ego-surfing,” the act of searching for references to yourself on the Internet. Follow this link to read more about the update.

Here’s more about a new contextual addition to the dictionary: “A new sense has been added to the verb heart in this update, and it may be the first English usage to develop via the medium of T-shirts and bumper-stickers. It originated as a humorous reference to logos featuring a picture of a heart as a symbol for the verb love, like that of the famous ‘I ♥ NY’ tourism campaign. The earliest quote for this use, from 1984, uses the verb in ‘I heart my dog’s head,’ a jokey play on bumper stickers declaring devotion to a particular breed of dog.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Barnes & Noble Review will continue Katherine A. Powers long-running “A Reading Life” column.

Here’s more from the release: “Barnes & Noble is also proud to announce that the literary column A Reading Life by Katherine A. Powers, formerly appearing in The Boston Globe, will now be featured exclusively in the online Barnes & Noble Review. The popular and acclaimed reviewer and essayist will offer her insightful contributions for Barnes & Noble customers through her bimonthly column beginning in April.”

Last month, we broke the news that The Boston Globe had discontinued “A Reading Life.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

National Post books editor Mark Medley (pictured, via) labeled himself a “book hoarder” in a new essay.

Here’s an excerpt: “I am unable to get rid of any of them. I own some terrible, terrible books — you wouldn’t believe how many crap books get published in this country — but cannot, for the life of me, part with a single one. I am a book hoarder, which, in my line of work, is a troublesome problem to have … Just now, I walked over to the part of the office where mail to me is delivered and counted 15 large containers filled with packages; these have come in the past three or four days. My first impression, upon seeing so many new books in one place, is to dive into them headfirst, like Scrooge McDuck into his vault of gold bullions.”

Do you share his affliction? Twitter research revealed that Medley is not alone. Author Robert Wiersema admitted that he rented a basement suite to use as a study and it now contains “piles of books on the floor and every horizontal surface.” Freehand Books editor Robyn Read regularly shops at garage sales to add to her collection.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.