Literature

March 3, 2023, 10:21am The portrait is stern, defiant, of bountiful hairline. Shot by Ramona Rosales for the cover of Prince Harry’s memoir Spare, it planted a flag in the golden Californian soil and hung a shark-tooth necklace around the decrepit institution it set out to eviscerate. Tiled in your local Barnes & Noble, it

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Running up that Hill’ is one of Kate Bush’s best-known and best-loved songs. The album on which it appeared, Hounds of Love (1985), represented a return to form for Bush after several years of less critically acclaimed (and commercially successful) releases. But in order to understand the true meaning

March 3, 2023, 11:54am Last night, the great pens of America convened at The Town Hall in NYC as Kal Penn presided over the 2023 PEN America Literary Awards. For those felled by late-winter viruses who desire to get a taste of proceedings, a recording is available here. Below are this year’s winners: PEN/Jean Stein

Emily Dickinson (1830-86) is one of the greatest American poets of the nineteenth century: the critic Martin Seymour-Smith, in his Guide to Modern World Literature, calls her one of only two great nineteenth-century American poets (the other being Walt Whitman). Dickinson wrote a great deal of poetry. Her Complete Poems includes almost 2,000 poems, most of

March 3, 2023, 11:54am Bad Robot has snagged the film rights to Mona Awad’s bestselling 2019 novel Bunny—a bloody satire of elite MFA programs that became a BookTok sensation after a Bunny movie fan-casting hashtag went viral. How viral? Somewhere in the region of 4.1 billion views. Bunny, now in its fourteenth printing, follows follows Samantha

‘The Necklace’ is an 1884 short story by the French writer Guy de Maupassant (1850-93), first published in Le Gaulois as ‘La parure’ in February of that year. If you’re unfamiliar with Maupassant’s work, ‘The Necklace’ is his most famous tale, and worth taking the time to read. If you’re a fan of stories with

TODAY: In 1945, poet Pablo Neruda is elected a Chilean senator.   Alice Robb on being unproductive at a writing residency: “I left not with the finished chapters I had hoped for, but with the knowledge that writing is—at least for me—a social act.” | Lit Hub Willard Spiegelman on pinning down the biography of poet Amy

There are many types of poem in the world, and even one particular verse form can be written in a variety of ways: to take just one example, there is the sonnet, but there are Petrarchan sonnets and Shakespearean sonnets and Spenserian sonnets, all of them requiring a rather different rhyme scheme. Below, we introduce

March 3, 2023, 1:12pm In big news for The Shop Around the Corner, Amazon.com Inc. was reported today to be pausing construction on its second headquarters in Virginia, per Bloomberg. Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, let the cranes dangle idly alongside the half-constructed steel middle finger to independent booksellers. Matt Day noted

‘Wolf-Alice’ is a short story from The Bloody Chamber, the 1979 collection of modern fairy tales written by the British author Angela Carter (1940-92). The story tells of a girl raised by wolves who goes to live with a Duke who is a werewolf. You can read ‘Wolf-Alice’ here before proceeding to our summary and

Every month, all the major streaming services add a host of newly acquired (or just plain new) shows, movies, and documentaries into their ever-rotating libraries. So what’s a dedicated reader to watch? Well, whatever you want, of course, but the name of this website is Literary Hub, so we sort of have an angle. To

Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense may be, after The Communist Manifesto, the most influential political tract ever written. It galvanised countless Americans living among the Thirteen Colonies, who were then unconvinced by the notion of independence, that breaking from British rule and declaring independence was the best course of action for the colonies. Paine

March 2, 2023, 12:43pm When they’re not launching NFTs or pasting their own labels onto mass-produced wine bottles, celebrities love to dip an Ozempic toe into the waters of children’s literature. Most recently, the world learned that Taylor Swift was getting the Golden Book treatment, but she seemingly doesn’t have much involvement with the project.

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The English pop group T’Pau have some interesting links with science fiction. Not only did the band take their name from a Vulcan elder who featured in the sci-fi series Star Trek, but their most famous song, ‘China in Your Hand’, was inspired by a book that’s arguably the

In memory we are standing in the kitchen of the Treman Cottage at Breadloaf. It is late afternoon in the summer of 1976 and I have brought my copies of Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk and Dismantling the Silence for Charles Simic to sign. He is slouching a bit, leaning

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) If Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as the old quip has it, has too many quotations in it, his Julius Caesar cannot be far behind. A whole host of now familiar quotations and expressions – many of which now have the ring of traditional proverbs, with others furnishing John Green with his

March 1, 2023, 2:03pm Earlier this week, Ewan McGregor was photographed in Bolton on the set of A Gentleman in Moscow, Paramount+’s upcoming limited series adaptation of Amor Towles’ mega-bestselling 2016 novel. McGregor plays the titular gentleman, Count Alexander Rostov, who, in in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, is banished by a Soviet tribunal to an attic