Today in Bookish and Literary History, November 3

 1860 Poet and critic Matthew Arnold begins his series of lectures "On Translating Home" as Oxford Professor of Poetry at Oxford University (UK)

1916 Playwright Eugene O'Neill makes his New York debut with "Bound East for Cardiff" with the Provincetown Players

2015 The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende

Sweeping through time and spanning generations and continents, The Japanese Lover is written with the same keen understanding of her characters that Isabel Allende has been known for since her landmark first novel The House of the Spirits. The Japanese Lover is a moving tribute to the constancy of the human heart in a world of unceasing change.

2015 Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving

Avenue of Mysteries is the story of what happens to Juan Diego in the Philippines, where what happened to him in the past—in Mexico—collides with his future.

2015 The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King

The masterful #1 New York Times bestselling story collection from O. Henry Prize winner Stephen King that includes twenty-one iconic stories with accompanying autobiographical comments on when, why, and how he came to write (or rewrite) each one.

• Winner of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award

2020 The Best of Me by David Sedaris

For the first time collected in one volume, the author brings us his funniest and most memorable work. In these stories, Sedaris shops for rare taxidermy, hitchhikes with a lady quadriplegic, and spits a lozenge into a fellow traveler’s lap. He drowns a mouse in a bucket, struggles to say “give it to me” in five languages, and hand-feeds a carnivorous bird.