If you're looking for some appropriate Halloween literature, I recommend the new 2010 edition of Jules Verne's The Castle in Transylvania (originally published as The Castle in the Carpathians in 1893). I'll let the cover speak for itself: "In its first new translation in over 100 years, this is the first book to set a gothic horror story, featuring people who may or may not be dead, in Transylvania."

I just finished it and enjoyed it very much.

• Read the Salon.com review here.


• Read the Barnes & Noble review here.


• See the castle that may have inspired the novel here.


• Read my Goodreads review here.

Speaking of Halloween literature, check out the Haunted House Tour 2010, where Maurissa Guibord and some of her fellow fantasy and suspense authors have gathered to fill a virtual haunted house with appropriately spooky short fiction for the Halloween season.

Last but not least, via agameofthree: "How to make your own pumpkin spice latte."


Text of the Day: Today's text is the short story "The Revolt of the Machines" by Nat Schachner (1895-1955) and Arthur L. Zagat (1895-1948). (Why yes, I am having fun with this. Could you tell?)

Teaser: For five thousand years, since that nigh legendary figure Einstein wrote and thought in the far-off mists of time, the scientists endeavored to reduce life and the universe to terms of a mathematical formula. And they thought they had succeeded. Throughout the world, machines did the work of man, and the aristos, owners of the machines, played in soft idleness in their crystal and gold pleasure cities. Even the prolat hordes, relieved of all but an hour or two per day of toil, were content in their warrens—content with the crumbs of their masters.

Read the complete story here.