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 is part two of a five-part series on the craft of writing by Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante. All too often, plot is taught as architecture, as per Freitig’s Triangle: rising action, …| Literary Hub
Hooray, a spot of good news! The Gotham Book Prize, given annually to recognize a new book about New York City, has just released its list of finalists. Formed in 2020 by Howard Wolfson of Bloomber…| Literary Hub
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. I’ve always been obsessed with Google Maps, specifically street view, but even more so since becoming a novelist. I have s…| 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
“…human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.” Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1986) * Sleep was a mystery to our distant ance…| Literary Hub
Ten years before I became a dad, I was at MacDowell, eating dinner at a communal table with two poets. They were a decade older, a man and a woman. They were talking about having kids. “I don’t wan…| Literary Hub
One spring afternoon in 2023, I received an unexpected phone call from Lewis Lapham, whose voice I’d been listening to since 1998, when I joined the editorial staff of Harper’s Magazine. We hadn’t …| Literary Hub
“You see that line on the ground? Follow it to the end and make everybody move around you.” These were the instructions of my sister’s best friend in high school. Her name was Car…| Literary Hub
Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themsel…| Literary Hub
At midcentury, Marianne Moore emerged as a public personage, but not before a painful period of loss. Prefaced by a host of personal disasters—the death of her mother’s onetime partner Mary Norcro…| Literary Hub
I do my best not to stare at Sabine at work. Actually, that isn’t true: I do my best not to get caught staring at Sabine at work. Though on certain days, if I’m feeling downright bratty, I need to …| 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
In my grandma’s middle room, there are six long wooden shelves that house my great-great-grandfather Jefferson’s personal library. You’ll find Arabian Nights, the Iliad and Odyssey by Homer, and th…| Literary Hub
Olivia Rutigliano is an Editor at Lit Hub and CrimeReads, and a book editor at their parent company Grove Atlantic. Her other work appears in Vanity Fair, Vulture, Lapham's Quarterly, the Los Angel…| Literary Hub
Hello there. Perhaps you clicked on this link because you have heard people cite Shakespeare on the necessity of killing all the lawyers and wonder if it’s a myth. Or maybe you suspect itR…| 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
The hard thing about writing—or one of the hard things in the endless series of hard things about writing—is that there’s no one way to do it. Instead, there are infinite paths in the dark woods of…| Literary Hub
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. How do you become a writer? Answer: you write. It’s amazing how much resentment and disgust and evasion this answer can ar…| 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
