Librarians are on the front lines of history and current events, when news and change arrive at a furious clip that only quickens every day. And without libraries, my work would simply not exist. I was a child who read| Literary Hub
For Teju Cole, prose, poetry, and photography tug against and bleed into one another. At the tenth anniversary of Amherst College’s LitFest, on March 1, 2025, Cole spoke with The Common’s Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker about his novel Tremor,| Literary Hub
I don’t love the cold and damp that November brings to my corner of the world, but I do enjoy the magic of longer nights. A crisp, clear evening is perfect for stargazing—and then for heading inside to get cozy| Literary Hub
As the Trump administration continues to fete the supposed success of the Gaza ceasefire, the Israeli occupation of Gaza is ongoing. And while the scale of the last two years’ violence is unprecedented, the fact of it is not new.| Literary Hub
The strangeness of the experience of running away, the abrupt departure of enslavement, shocked the consciousness of those who experienced it, creating a kind of daze that animated those who built …| 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
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
Over 600 writers and poets [3/10/2024 Update: this number now stands at over 1300]—including Roxane Gay, Alissa Nutting, Marie-Helene Bertino, Kiese Laymon, Saeed Jones, Fady Joudah, Carmen Maria M…| Literary Hub
Hello. Lots of folks have asked me if the phrase “The Tortured Poets Department,” which is the title of Taylor Swift’s new album, is grammatically correct. Maybe! It might be grammatically correct,…| 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
