Ruth Ozeki’s A Book of Form and Emptiness is out today, so we spoke to her about professors she fell in love with, accessing the liminal fictional space in the early hours of the morning, and…| Literary Hub
The “primary purpose” of New World slaves, Sidney Mintz wrote, was to serve as manual laborers engaged…in the production of market commodities…Slaves were not primarily a source of pres…| Literary Hub
It was ninety minutes before opening and four hours before the lunch rush on the day in early March when Miguel called to say that although he’d already arrived at the restaurant, he needed to leav…| Literary Hub
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. I’m not sure how to survive without writing. It is what I want to do with the time I am alive. The idea of sacrificin…| Literary Hub
My wife was, at one time, a very beautiful woman. But over time, her beauty faded, and with it went her desire for me. There were so many years of notoriety that had held us together, my success, h…| Literary Hub
My absolute favorite task, when I was the Vice President of Awards for the National Book Critics Circle, was when we had narrowed down all of the titles we’d considered to five finalists for our si…| Literary Hub
It’s a week after America’s latest, and far from greatest, election, a day that many of us are still processing. I have so much to say, as we all do, and I’ll say it elsewhere soo…| Literary Hub
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways …| Literary Hub
My students call it “Chat,” a cute nickname they all seem to have agreed on at some point. They use it to make study guides, interpret essay prompts, and register for classes, turning it loose on t…| Literary Hub
The mass of all Ruth knew was a dot in the void. As the dot grew, so too did its perimeter with the void; every factual acquisition indicated a tranche of new unknowns, education the process of bec…| Literary Hub
Francoise Gilot, who died recently, is remembered as the only one of Picasso’s mistresses to leave him. She emerged triumphantly from their relationship, in fact, becoming a successful artist in he…| Literary Hub
Something felt off. Tim Searchinger lacked the proper credentials to say exactly what was off that day in the spring of 2003. He was a lawyer, not a scientist or economist. He was reading a complex…| Literary Hub
Joan Didion looks straight at the camera, with her fist curled in front of her mouth—as if to indicate it is through her hands that the taciturn thinker speaks. Appropriately, a manual typewriter t…| Literary Hub
For both the McKenna brothers, ethnobotanist Terence and ethnopharmacologist Dennis, and for anyone else with the courage and respiratory fortitude to hold a couple of lungfuls of its vapor in thei…| Literary Hub
First, an apology. I was asked by English PEN to respond to any line, phrase or word from the 4 articles that make up the PEN Charter—and I’m afraid I’ve taken up this offer in the manner of a gues…| Literary Hub
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. The fullest day I know of begins with taking a portrait of a stranger in the middle of nowhere by 10 a.m. I do this while …| Literary Hub
Welcome to the second round of Literary Hub’s inaugural Ides of March Madness bracket: The Best Villains in Literature. After a vigorous first round of voting, 32 villains advance and 32 have…| Literary Hub
In 2016, Paul Beatty became the first American author to win the Man Booker Prize. Given that perhaps most readers came to know Beatty’s prose through an excerpt from his first novel published in G…| Literary Hub
This story was co-published by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. “Poor people” are “my people” Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has said. In his best…| Literary Hub
When the witty and wry English fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett interviewed Bill Gates for GQ in 1995, only 39% of Americans had access to a home computer. According to the Pew Research Center, the…| Literary Hub
There can be few more damning or more useless terms than “the Dark Ages.” They sound fun in an orcs‐and‐elves sort of way and suggest a very low benchmark from which we have since, as a…| Literary Hub
If best-of book lists are fun to argue about then New York Times’s list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century has already provided hours of entertainment. We’ve argued over the merits of indivi…| Literary Hub
Last week, The New York Times Book Review published a list of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” (Well, so far, obviously. Why not just call it the best books of the last 25 year…| Literary Hub
In her recent essay “Anxiety and Responsibility: What Stories Can Come From Our Current Moment,” Clare Pollard almost wholly encapsulates a prevailing literary ethos: that the primary function of s…| Literary Hub
In A.V. Marraccini’s book We the Parasites, Marraccini describes a critic’s relationship to a work of art as parasitic. Like female wasps which crawl into female figs, thus pollinating the fig’s in…| Literary Hub
For an embodiment of the word singlehanded you might turn to the heroine of the recent movie Woman at War. It’s about an Icelandic eco-saboteur who blows up rural power lines and hides in scenic sp…| Literary Hub
Of course I stole the title for this talk from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a so…| Literary Hub
