Fiction from fact and the birth of Lolita: Sally Horner of Camden, New Jersey was abducted in 1948 when she was 11 years old. For almost two years, she was shuttled around the country by her abductor, Frank La Salle, whose convoluted criminal past went unnoticed by friends and neighbors who believed his story - that he was her loving, albeit controlling, father. Although her story didn't leave the local media, it caught the attention of one man who would use the news accounts as a springboard for one of his most important works - Vladimir Nabokov, and his Lolita. Read more here at Hazlitt, from Penguin Random House. For more Nabokov, see this Playboy interview from 1964 at Longform.org.
On the spoken word, in verse: Damion Searls of the Paris Review Daily ruminates on overheard haiku: "Around half a tweet, but again, a very different form."
Laura Ingalls, even wilder: For those who grew up reading the Little House series, a researched annotated autobiography titled Pioneer Girl is available from the South Dakota Historical Society Press. Read the Slate review by Ruth Graham.
Another childhood favorite hits the big scream - er, screen: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is being developed for film by John August with CBS films.