Nobody—and I mean NOBODY—warned me about my pubic hair. It glistened for years, springy and sprite, an Ivory Soap-scented welcome mat for lucky episodic visitors. I never gave it much thought, certainly didn’t see a need to clock in every| Literary Hub
Unlike the obsessive protagonists of The Trial and The Castle, who draw us into their labyrinthine thinking, Karl Rossmann, the naive young hero of Kafka’s Amerika or, to use Kafka’s own title, Der Verschollene (“The Missing Person”), bumbles through the| Literary Hub
Before the war, I worked as an English language teacher at a kindergarten in the Gaza Strip. In the evenings, I gave private lessons to students at my own educational centre beneath my house. I had been working since university,| Literary Hub
Last fall in Maine, my eleven-year-old son contacted a sharpshooter and requested two deer heads. Once or twice a year on Peaks Island, where we live, a professional marksman ventures into the woods at night to cull deer and maintain| Literary Hub
More than twenty years ago, I walked into Kremer Pigment, a small shop in lower Manhattan, and by the time I left, I had the idea for a novel—a story about pigment—and had signed up for a workshop in traditional| Literary Hub
When my essay about paying for $42,000 worth of dental work with sugar baby money first ran in HuffPost Personal, I was thrilled. Having only published in small literary magazines before, I wasn’t used to the feeling of strangers actually| Literary Hub
Dystopian fiction is getting real, and I’m here for it. I don’t think I’m the only one. There’s something cathartic about reading about the end of the world. As a science fiction reader and avid fan, I find that dystopian| Literary Hub
Lucas, His Communications Since he not only writes but likes to go over to the other side and read what others write, Lucas is surprised sometimes at how difficult it turns out to be for him to understand some things.| Literary Hub
First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin,| Literary Hub
“Laying someone to rest is the final act of care that leaves a lingering impression, not only on the dead, but on you.” Eden Royce on the importance of funerary details in the face of grief. | Lit …| Literary Hub
Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, and Samanta Schweblin’s Good and Evil all feature among the best reviewed books of the months. * 1.…| Literary Hub
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
Sally Rooney, the iconic Millennial bard, can no longer safely enter the United Kingdom for fear of arrest. The author behind Intermezzo and Normal People recently received English flack for her su…| 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
Memoir Nation: Weekly Inspiration for Writers is an extension of the Memoir Nation community hosted by Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner, two friends and colleagues who bring a community-minded sens…| Literary Hub
The first nice thing this week is an institutional birthday. Thanks to the attentive ministrations of our dear Drew Broussard, it’s officially been one year since we launched The Lit Hub Podc…| 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
We founded our community with the best of intentions, chartering our Earthtrust Agricultural Cooperative with shared courage and shared hope, collectively signing a ninety-nine-year work contract i…| Literary Hub
On this week’s podcast, writers Pamela Paul and Mira Jacob talk with V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell about the literary side of reboots, comics, and superheroes. Editor of the New Yor…| 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
______________________________ Lena Moses-Schmitt is a writer and artist. Her poems, essays, and graphic essays have appeared in Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, The Believer, Ecotone, The Rumpus, Nar…| 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
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Bewitching, Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s The Aviator and the Showman, and Vivek Shanbhag’s Sakina’s Kiss all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by…| 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
Humidity be damned, this month’s crop of books is sparking with exciting new premises and relationship dynamics. You’ve got robots-turned-cooks, an economy built entirely on mandatory memory collec…| 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
What they don’t tell you when you decide that you’d like to cover books for a living (or something like that), is how guilty you’ll feel a lot of the time. Just consider for a moment the plight of …| 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
Photo from The Samuels Public Library After being targeted by anti-LGBTQ book banners and having their funding pulled, a local library in Virginia successfully stopped a threatened takeover by a pr…| 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
Another win for freedom to read legislation on the West Coast this week, as Oregon’s state House of Representatives passed Senate Bill 1098 on Monday, a bill that will protect access to books in sc…| Literary Hub
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty-five books on feminism, western and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walk…| 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
Brittany K. Allen is a writer and actor living in Brooklyn.| 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
The Sensuous Dirty Old Man (1971) is credited to “Dr. A”… but “the secret is out,” admits a paperback edition, naming the author as Isaac Asimov, “undoubtedly the best writer in America” per …| 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
Naomi Klein, Michelle Alexander, Hisham Matar, Isabella Hammad, Maaza Mengiste, Zaina Arafat, and Susan Muaddi Darraj are among the writers who have signed a damning open letter to PEN America in w…| Literary Hub
And now for my hottest take in a minute: There are already too many books in the world. As a reader, I’m constantly overwhelmed with new material, and I know I’m not alone. And this is before we fa…| 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
1) Do not read the whole original post or what it links to, which will dilute the purity of your response and reduce your chances of rebuking the poster for not mentioning anything they might’…| 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 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
One of my dreams is for my books and my writings to travel the world, for my pen to have wings so that no unstamped passport or visa rejection can hold it back. Another dream of mine is to have a …| 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
