Fat Bear Week, Sense and Sensibility, Fairy Tale Art, Pizza, & More: Endnotes 25 September

Every Friday, we celebrate the weekend — and all the reading and relaxing and daydreaming time ahead — with Melissa's favorite book- and travel-related links of the week. Why work when you can read fun stuff?!

This post is part of our Endnotes series.

Oh, heck yeah, fat bears! The yearly celebration of berries, bellies, and hibernation has begun! From now until 29 September, you can vote for your favorite among 16 brown bears at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska. Meet the bears here. Last year’s grand champion was the 1200-pound Chunk, and the AP wonders Can He Win Again? You can get all the details you need and vote in this thrilling competition on the official website. Don’t miss the Hall of Champions. You can get up close and personal with the bears from the safety and comfort of your couch with this live cam of Brooks Falls. It’s quite soothing to watch the bears frolic in the river and snack on salmon. (Explore.org has 200+ live cams, if you’d prefer to watch Orca whales, Tembe Elephant Park in South Africa, or the Puppy Cam at Warrior Canine Connections, a non-profit organization that teaches combat veterans how to train service dogs for fellow veterans. The Explore.org YouTube channel also posts the best moments from the live nature cams!

• One of our favorite children’s books is I Want My Hat Back, an adventure tale about a polite (until he’s not) bear who loses his favorite red hat and goes on a quest to find it. In just 32 pages, author Jon Klassen tells an emotional story that rivals a novel ten times as long. He recently won the 2026 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and talked to LitHub about his latest book. Be sure to treat yourself to this puppet show re-enactment of I Want My Hat Back.

• Emily St. John Mandel answered a Q&A with Electric Lit about her new book Exit Party and embracing the mess of a first draft. ‘You start editing and at first the problems are enormous. And then with every revision, the problems just get smaller and smaller and smaller. And when I find myself moving commas around, that’s when I know it’s time to hand it off to somebody else.’

• The 1995 Emma Thompson-helmed Sense and Sensibility adaptation is perfect in every way (trailer, and/but I’m excited for the new one. Here’s the eye candy of the new Sense and Sensibility filming locations. ‘Stately homes, bucolic English landscapes and a tumbledown cottage coalesce to form the backdrop to the latest Austen adaptation.’

• Sorta related; Stop Adapting Jane Austen! Five other 18th‑century writers ‘perfect for the screen,’ including Samuel Richardson — I’ve had his novel Pamela on my TBR forever because it’s mentioned in my beloved Jane Eyre and Anne Radcliffe (the Gothic novelist loved by Austen herself).

• The Sylvia Plath rap you didn’t know you needed:

• Very relevant to our interests: Why the Places We Love in Books Can Never Quite Be Found in Real Life. ‘Haworth, Bath and Dorset all exist, obviously. They can be found on a map and visited. But the Brontë moors, Austen’s Bath, Wordsworth’s Lakes and Hardy’s Wessex are also literary reimaginings of those places. They may never have existed in quite the form readers imagine.’

• A new podcast for Spooky Season! Twice a week, The Haunted Library co-hosts — Irish actor Colin Morgan and Scottish actress Katie Leung — read novels and short stories that have become classics of the horror genre. So far, they’ve released a few chapters of Strange Case of Doctor Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.

• Related: The 8 Greatest Gothic Horror Books of the Last 25 Years, Ranked.

• I’m a huge fan of Lucy Foley’s closed-circle-of-suspects mysteries like The Hunting Party set in Scotland on New Year’s Eve, and The Guest List, which takes place at a hazardous wedding at a posh Irish island resort. In this essay for The Guardian, she talks about writing her new book Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel — a new Miss Marple mystery. ‘When I was asked to write the first full-length Miss Marple novel since Sleeping Murder was published posthumously, 50 years ago in October, I immediately thought of my granny. My first encounter with the world of Agatha Christie was through her.’

• The woodland creatures in these precise paper collages by Caryle Lewis look like they were magicked from the pages of a fairy tale. (The book The Paper Girl is also amazing!)

• You’re Probably Eating Pizza Wrong. Not possible.

• Quiz: How well do you know UNESCO’s newest World Heritage sites? Yikes: I got 8/15.

• ‘There is no respectable woman… that sells books!’ Read the memoirs of 19th-century women who sold books door to door. ‘These works record the physical, intellectual, and emotional labor of canvassing, offering a window into the otherwise little-documented experiences of women working in a field that both recruited and presented numerous challenges for them.’ (This reminds me of The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson.

They’re all good bears.

Top image courtesy of Becca/Unsplash.