A satirical confession, from an imagined designer who unleashed the style of book cover with “amorphous shapes of suggestive colors” on the world. I’ve created a monster. I’m the designer who first…| Literary Hub
Time keeps on slippin’ into the future, and the books keep right on coming, no matter what’s going on outside. Want to fly like an eagle? Already finished everything on this list? Check…| Literary Hub
A middle-aged couple park their car outside a modest suburban house. The husband turns off the engine then returns his hands to the wheel, eyes forward and jaw set. His wife looks out of the passeng…| Literary Hub
Spooky season is upon us again. (At least if you’re in the Northeast corridor.) So this week, Lit Hubbers enjoyed autumnal fare. I’m talking leaf-peeping, and freaky Fridays. We’ve got reflection and hibernation on the brain. Whether that means hunkering| Literary Hub
What a time to be alive, for starters! Axl Rose, the notorious Guns N’ Roses frontman, is turning his talents to the graphic novel. In a new collaboration with Sumerian Comics, a Tennessee publisher with Simon & Schuster distribution, Mr.| Literary Hub
When we first encounter Lyra Silvertongue, neé Belacqua, she is hidden in a wardrobe and listening intently to her uncle, Lord Asriel, give a presentation to Oxford scholars on his findings about Dust. Though she is only eleven years old,| Literary Hub
Below is Toni Morrison’s introduction to The Harlem Book of the Dead by James Van Der Zee, Owen Dodson, and Camille Billops It is fashionable these days to hear among photography lovers the cry, “Oh, those early photographers really knew how to| Literary Hub
Aisling Walsh on the 30-year legacy of His Dark Materials and why Philip Pullman understands that “true evil is never about the distorted cravings of a single person.” | Lit Hub Criticism Toni Morrison explores the intimacy and humanity in| Literary Hub
The Kitchen It starts here: in the kitchen. Not a full-size kitchen, of course, but rather a miniature replica of a kitchen, a tiny kitchen with a tiny table where two tiny dolls sit, blank-eyed and smiling and ready to| Literary Hub
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. The creative act of writing has brought meaning into my life in myriad ways, but it made itself known initially in the experience of flow. I’m referring to the sense| Literary Hub
Beirut, 2001 I am twenty-four years old when they amputate Baba’s foot. He will drag it halfway around the world for one more year, but for now he has no choice but to stop and convalesce, with me by his| Literary Hub
A weekly behind-the-scenes dive into everything interesting, dynamic, strange, and wonderful happening in literary culture—featuring Lit Hub staff, columnists, and special guests! Hosted by Drew Broussard. Would spooky season be complete with some Stephen King? Constant reader, I submit to| 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
This essay originally appears in Freeman’s: Home. Mexico, Maine sits in a valley or “River Valley” as we call the area, because I suppose you can’t have one without the other. The hills are l…| Literary Hub
Once upon a time, a child was born into wealth and wanted for nothing, but he was possessed by bottomless, endless, grating, grasping wanting, and wanted more, and got it, and more after that, and …| Literary Hub
At an early age, Anthony Comstock felt he was destined for glory. As a child in New Canaan, Connecticut, he was enchanted when his mother read him stories from the Bible about saintly heroes battli…| Literary Hub
The death of competition spells doom for regulation. Competition is an essential component of effective regulation, for two reasons: First, competition keeps the companies within a sector from all …| Literary Hub
Mekyah (pronounced meh-kai-yah) Davis lives in a small town in the southwest mountains of Virginia near the Tennessee and Kentucky borders. His love of Appalachia and his family’s place in the regi…| 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
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
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
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
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
