Literature

It started with a toaster and ended with a Maytag washerdryer combo and four new steel-belted radials. In between, the UPS, FedEx, Lowe’s deliverer, or mail carrier set down on my front porch a Cuisinart blender, a fifty-pound bag of dog kibble, an ottoman, a six-pack of Yankee bird feeders, one vintage ukulele from a

Today’s Featured Book Deals $1.99 Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden Get This Deal $4.99 Forest Euphoria by Partricia Ononiwu Kaishan Get This Deal $1.99 The Mercy Makers by Tessa Gratton Get This Deal $2.99 To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage Get This Deal $1.99 When the Emperor

TODAY: In 1908, Salvadoran poet Vicente Acosta dies on his birthday. Tarot reader Lisa Stardust examines Sylvia Plath’s relationship to her deck. | Lit Hub Criticism How the expectation that “books are now asked to function simultaneously as texts and as lifestyle objects” influences cover design in the social media era. | Lit Hub Design

What’s also concerning is how many lawmakers and board officials desire to make–or have made–these “tools” necessary ones for professionals to use to do their jobs. York County Library in South Carolina, for example, cites RatedBooks as one of the reputable sources library workers should use to make collection decisions (something that the partisan-designed site

This month, a fresh adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved Little House on the Prairie arrives on Netflix. The reboot’s timing is auspicious. 2026 saw the apex of the tradwife discourse. And if the Brooklyn streets are anything to go by, a certain prairiecore aesthetic refuses to go quietly. Pioneer nostalgia has tended to spike when

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The following first appeared via Rebecca Solnit’s Meditations in an Emergency. Article continues after advertisement Last weekend, the film The Odyssey was released and the Tate brothers were arrested in Florida at the behest of the British government, which seeks to extradite them to face a long list of charges. Andrew Tate is charged with

By the time this post is out in the world, I will have seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey at least two times. There are a few minor things I might change were it up to me, but overall it blew me away; for a nerd who loves Greek mythology, an epic journey, lots of juicy

My first experience with AI image description was both mundane and profound. I was reclining on the bed in our East Village sublet, writing and drinking afternoon coffee—”Prousting,” as my partner Alabaster and I call it—when a new app landed in my inbox. I downloaded it and snapped a picture of the room, crammed with

Since 2006, the Center for Fiction has been highlighting the best debut novels of the year through its First Novel Prize. This year’s 180 eligible titles were published in the US between January 1st and December 31st, and were narrowed down to 19 books by more than 500 writers, librarians, booksellers, and others. The shortlist

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET TODAY: In 1886, Hella Wuolijoki is born. Why writing alt text image descriptions is an act of literary translation. | Lit Hub Technology April Dávila explores the neuroscience of writer’s block (and what we can do to conquer it). | Lit Hub Craft How Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston,

Beloved Japanese author Haruki Murakami will publish a new memoir this fall. Abandoning a Cat: A Personal Story will be published by Knopf, and it will be translated into English by Philip Gabriel. The memoir expands upon an essay published by Murakami in The New Yorker from 2019 called “Abandoning a Cat.” The memoir will

During a pivotal moment in The Odyssey, Circe sends Odysseus to the Kingdom of the Dead to find the soothsayer who can instruct him on how to return home after more than a dozen years away. But to travel to the Kingdom of the Dead, our “complicated” (the most fitting Homeric epithet, introduced only a

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THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET TODAY: In 1930, Brazilian poet, playwright, and novelist Hilda Hilst is born. Why more retellings of the Odyssey should center women: “We are like Penelope, unraveling Homer’s tale for our own purposes.” | Lit Hub Criticism How Jean-Paul Sartre and other French intellectuals came to embrace Marxism, to the

A comprehensive education on American culinary traditions has to include African American foodways. Needless to say, there is no one culture that defines American cuisine. From the crops grown by Indigenous peoples to the ingredients brought to the U.S. by immigrants seeking a taste of home, the library of American recipes is contained in a

“If he had simply gone back to Austin when he was summoned to stand trial, he would have been acquitted.” This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. Article continues after advertisement Famously, O. Henry (the pen name of William Sydney Porter), author of “The Gift of the Magi,” and one of the most

Rebecca is channeling a bard, Jeff’s referencing multiple epics, Vanessa’s making noises about the score. The nerd factor is turned all the way up today, because we’ve all officially seen The Odyssey. We always do the homework here at Book Riot, and we won’t even try to pretend that we don’t love it when the