Literature

January 12, 2023, 12:27pm There’s no denying that Colleen Hoover has had an incredible year. Still, despite the relentless appetite for her novels, it seems that the people do not, in fact, want a coloring book based on her number-one bestselling book It Ends With Us, which centers on an abusive relationship faced by protagonist Lily

‘Speech to the Young’, full title ‘Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward’, is a poem by the American poet Gwendolyn Brooks, included in her 1970 collection Family Pictures as well as several subsequent collections. The poem is dedicated to Brooks’ two children, Nora Brooks Blakely and Henry Blakely III, although in a sense

There’s two types of walks: the kind where you stop to name every living thing, and the kind where you don’t. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, my earliest memories of the outdoors include working slowly through the state park near my childhood home, learning the names of ground plants and trees. Surrounded as we

Here’s a question for you. Which classic song began as Scrambled Eggs, was a song that the songwriter couldn’t convince any other singer to record, and yet went on to become the most-covered song every written? The answer is ‘Yesterday’, now one of the most popular and best-known Beatles songs. But this song, whose meaning

January 11, 2023, 2:34pm We all took up a new hobby during the pandemic, whether it was knitting, baking, pottery, woodcarving, running, mixology, rollerblading, or mirror typing ancient books in their original languages using an elaborate system of blank keyboards. Yes, for a while there it seemed like every Gen Z influencer on TikTok was recording

TODAY: In 1843, Francis Scott Key, American lawyer, author, and amateur poet who wrote the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” dies.    It’s that time again: Here are our 231 most anticipated books of 2023. | Lit Hub He said, “I see you got some wheels. I want to get the hell out of here.” The late Russell Banks recalls

‘Harlem’ is a short poem by Langston Hughes (1901-67). Hughes was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance in New York in the 1920s. Over the course of a varied career he was a novelist, playwright, social activist, and journalist, but it is for his poetry that Hughes is now best-remembered. Given his centrality to

January 10, 2023, 11:53am If your New Year’s resolution was something along the lines of: attend more events or be a better literary citizen, I have good news for you! Here are a handful of virtual events you can enjoy from the comfort of your couch/bed/bathtub without spending a dime. (Because you’re probably also resolving

January 10, 2023, 8:29am As someone in the throes of the humiliating exercise that is asking writers you admire to read your book and write nice things about it, I almost empathize with Mike Pompeo. In case you forgot (guilty!), Pompeo served as both the director of the CIA and Secretary of State under Trump, and his

‘Raymond’s Run’ is a 1971 short story by Toni Cade Bambara (1939-95) which originally appeared in the anthology Tales and Short Stories for Black Folks. In the story, a young girl named Hazel Parker prepares for a race; Bambara uses this plot to explore the challenges young black women face as they learn to assert

January 9, 2023, 11:53am Remember Ray’s Occult Books, the rundown Manhattan bookstore opened by an unmoored Ray Stantz between Ghostbusters I and II following the city of New York serving him and his fellow ghostbusters with a judicial restraining order for the property damage incurred during their city-saving battle against the the shape-shifting god Gozer in Ghostbusters I?

I teach songwriting, but when I want to talk with students about the process they’re engaged in, I turn to prose writers for help. I find that they’re just better at “writing about writing” than most musicians are, which maybe shouldn’t be a shocker: writing is what writers do. But when I’m really lucky, I’ll

‘Morning Poem’ is a poem by the American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), a poet who has perhaps not received as much attention from critics as she deserves. It’s been estimated that she was the bestselling poet in the United States at the time of her death, so a few words of analysis about some of

This talk was delivered at the 2019 Edinburgh International Book Festival. One of the longest biographies of recent years, the ill-fated Philip Roth by Blake Bailey, runs to 800 pages. It takes a total of 31 hours and 46 minutes to listen to on audiobook. Roth was 85 when he died, so his real life

January 6, 2023, 9:07am Wow. Fay Weldon, who died earlier this week at 91, did not mince words. As chair of the 1983 Booker Prize committee (which awarded top honors to JM Coetzee’s sublimely bleak Life and Times of Michael K) Weldon was given the mic at the awards ceremony, and took the opportunity to

‘Life Doesn’t Frighten Me’ is a well-known poem by Maya Angelou (1928-2014). It is the title poem from Angelou’s 1993 collection Life Doesn’t Frighten Me, which was marketed as a children’s book although Angelou did not originally conceive the poems as being specifically for children. A brave, defiant poem about the power that can be

January 6, 2023, 10:56am This week, at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, Todd Field’s Tár was awarded Best Picture, and Cate Blanchett took home Best Actress for her performance. During her remarks, as Sam Adams reported on Twitter, she told the crowd, “When I was making Tár, I read a lot of Rebecca

TODAY:  In 1986, Mexican author Juan Rulfo dies at 67.    “I raised four children, wrote five more novels—and finally got old enough to think about being young.” Allegra Goodman on writing about youth. | Lit Hub Standing under Mussolini’s balcony: Andrea Bajani considers fascism and family in modern Italy (tr. by Minna Zallman Proctor). | Lit