June 23, 2022, 12:21pm I was first introduced to the great Frances McDormand as a pig-tailed, knife-wielding women’s studies professor in the Nancy Meyers’ film Something’s Gotta Give, which might remain my favorite role of hers—you know, sentimentally—but there’s a lot more where that came from, including Sarah Polley’s forthcoming adaptation of Miriam Toews’ novel
Literature
June 22, 2022, 2:14pm Julie Otsuka is one of the greatest and most important writers of our time. I will die on this hill. Here at Literary Hub dot com, I have very adamantly and repeatedly made a case for The Buddha in the Attic being one of the best books ever, for the way she
The poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) has given us a number of phrases which have passed into common use: ‘green and pleasant land’ and ‘chariot of fire’ are just two of many examples. But what are the best Blake quotations, and what do they mean? In which of his works do they appear? Below,
June 22, 2022, 10:50am George Chauncey just became the first scholar of LGBTQ history to win the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, a $500,000 award for those whose work “advances understanding of the human experience.” Chauncey, the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of
June 21, 2022, 10:01am It was always pretty apparent that Russian journalist Dmitri A. Muratov is not particularly concerned with state authority, and is willing to put his life in harm’s way in defense of the truth. A stalwart of Russia’s perpetually embattled independent press, Muratov was awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for his
‘The Witness’ is a short text by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Not quite a short story and yet not an essay either, ‘The Witness’ runs to just two paragraphs and one page of text, and is a meditation on the passing of the last people to remember, or to have witnessed, dead
June 21, 2022, 10:14am In Jean-Paul Sartre’s novella The Childhood of a Leader, he wrote that there is “more destructive power” in pranks “than in all the works of Lenin.” Well, maybe if you are a headmaster who finds yourself unable to control a pack of unruly existentialist (graduate) students. In 1925, when Sartre was a
June 17, 2022, 8:45am Australian novelist John Hughes—who, as The Guardian reported earlier this week, plagiarized sections of his novel The Dogs from the extremely obscure novels All Quiet on the Western Front, Anna Karenina, and The Great Gatsby—has offered a rebuttal to claim(/fact) that he is a plagiarist: No, I’m not. Hughes wrote a bizarre defense in
How did Atlas, the figure from Greek mythology, come to give his name to a book of maps? And how did he give his name to one of the most famous geographical features in the world? Let’s take a closer look at the Atlas myth. Atlas was a Titan who was punished by being made
Juneteenth is for celebration. We celebrate the vitality and creativity of Black people, individually and collectively. But it’s a complicated kind of celebration, because it asks us to recognize that America’s democracy is structured by racial caste hierarchies—a matrix of exclusions, privileges and unequal life-chances derived from ideas about racial difference, and rooted in our
June 17, 2022, 9:12am Kalani Pickhart’s novel I Will Die in a Foreign Land is the winner of this year’s Young Lions Fiction Award, given by the New York Public Library every year to a writer under 35 for a novel or short story collection. The other finalists, which were announced in April, were Mateo
June 17, 2022, 9:16am To celebrate the release of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Knopf built a real-life version of one of the games in the book. It is . . . weirdly addicting, and also weirdly fun. Especially if you grew up on Mario Teaches Typing. “EmilyBlaster is one of [character] Sadie Green’s
June 17, 2022, 9:23am This weekend is Father’s Day, and while I could recommend some World War II books you could buy last-minute, instead I’m going to recommend that you read one of the few examples we have of actually good fathering among the canonical American writers of the 20th century: a letter from John
TODAY: In 1858, Charles Darwin receives a paper by Alfred Russel Wallace that includes nearly identical conclusions about evolution as Darwin’s own, prompting Darwin to publish his theory. Annie Proulx revisits William Golding’s 1980 novel, Rites of Passage. | Lit Hub Criticism Does Netflix’s $100 million adaptation of George Saunders’s “Escape From Spiderhead” stand
June 17, 2022, 12:36pm Honestly, I cannot believe I have not done this list yet because I (an adult) think about children’s books a lot, despite not having kids or really knowing any. (The pandemic hit before the majority of my colleagues procreated, so I have not properly bonded with their offspring at staff picnics;
What are some of the best, and best-known, short stories that feature animals? Many classic stories feature other species in prominent roles, whether it’s talking cats, dogs telling us their life stories, or primates giving academic reports at a conference (yes, really). Below, we select and introduce ten of the most iconic and famous stories
June 17, 2022, 9:53am A website called CatholicVote is telling its readers to hide books in library displays that have anything to do with the lives of queer people or people of color. This month, of course, the focus of their fragile and bigoted worldview is LGBQT+ visibility. Here’s a sample of their marching orders:
June 16, 2022, 12:08pm Finally, after months of waiting, we have footage Blonde—the hotly-anticipated Netflix movie adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ mammoth work of historical bio-fiction. [embedded content] Helmed by darkly-cerebral Australian director Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James, Mindhunter), the buzz around Blonde has been building around for a while, partly because of Ana