Literature

December 1, 2022, 10:57am Things at Twitter are going just fine! Remember when master tunnel-builder, confirmed monkey-killer, and brand new owner of Twitter Elon Musk told us all he’d be “forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints…”? Well, apparently by “widely diverse viewpoints” he just meant listening to alt right snowflake Andy Ngo’s

November 30, 2022, 9:30am Winter is coming, and we are not leaving our homes (but still want to attend book events)! * The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit-Feminist Led Celebration & DiscussionDecember 1 @ 7:30pm EST To celebrate the publication of Thenmozhi Soundararajan’s new book, The Trauma of Caste, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop is hosting

‘The Journey’ 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

November 30, 2022, 12:10pm Countless Republican politicians—who have never read anything longer than a pamphlet about how despite what the Bible says, Jesus actually hated poor people—have published entire books. Still, there’s something especially grotesque about Ron DeSantis, governor of the state with the second most book bans in the country, and who recently signed

The end of 2022 draws swiftly near, and with it the inevitable deluge of best-of lists. Have no fear; ours is coming. But first, and before things get truly hairy, we at Literary Hub wanted to take a moment to appreciate some of the books we’ve read recently that won’t be winning any new prizes

November 29, 2022, 11:36am The Fall of Tess Gunty (I speak of Autumn, not ruination) continues apace with news that the Indiana author’s much-ballyhooed debut novel The Rabbit Hutch—the story of a group of residents of a low-income housing community in a fictional Indiana town over the course of one sweltering summer—has been optioned for the

November 28, 2022, 9:48am Ah yes, gaslighting. It’s been with us since time immemorial, but like plenty of other terrible things, it was particularly big this year. “The increase in dictionary lookups for gaslighting is striking,” says Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s Editor at Large. “In our age of misinformation—’fake news,’ conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deepfakes—gaslighting has emerged

‘Simmering’ is a short story by the Canadian author and poet Margaret Atwood (born 1939). Published in Atwood’s 1983 collection Murder in the Dark, the story might be regarded as a piece of flash fiction, micro-fiction, or even an example of prose poetry. ‘Simmering’ posits a society in which men predominantly do the cooking, while

November 28, 2022, 12:01pm In case the barrage of Cyber Monday emails from every store you’ve ever patronized (or thought about patronizing, or accidentally landed on while searching for “normal pants”) on the internet has you on the verge of declaring a moratorium on holiday gift-giving and maybe Stuff in general, I have great news

The ratsand the jellyfishwill survive. The roaches and thecapybaraswill survive. The mosquitos, the fruit flies,the puggles and their soft beaks ofpost-apocalyptic adolescence will certainlysurvive. It’s us—malignant tumors ofominous origin, contagionsof hominid conceit—that won’t. And, anyway, of what usewould it be if we did? Another dreadful centurygone to vainglorious apathy andglamorous afflictions, goneto the silver nostalgias

Prisoners stumbled and clanked through the predawn light, making their way from the stockades where they slept to the mines where they labored in darkness. Prodded by guards and hobbled by ankle irons, they trudged every morning but Sundays through the heat, the rain, and even the occasional Alabama snow. Upon arriving at the pits,

In 2003, I wrote the first line of the first draft of the first book in the Ivy and Bean series: “Before Bean met Ivy, she didn’t like her.” I was sitting in the office at the top of my house, the same one I’m sitting in now, but it looked different. There weren’t as

TODAY: In 1922, Charles M. “Sparky” Schulz, American cartoonist and creator of the Peanuts strip, is born.    Eleanor Lanahan on discovering the hidden artistic talents of her grandmother: the one and only Zelda Fitzgerald. | Lit Hub Art Don’t shortchange short novels: Kenneth C. Davis on his year of reading briefly (and excellently). | Lit Hub Criticism When

For decades, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was known primarily as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife and highly quotable sidekick, the original Roaring Twenties flapper and model for many of her husband’s fictional heroines. With the women’s movement in the late 1960s came a resurgence of interest in Zelda’s own talents as a writer of fiction and as

‘Salvador Late or Early’ is a short story in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, a 1991 collection of short stories by the American writer Sandra Cisneros (born 1954). The story – which lacks a conventional plot and is more of a character study – briefly describes the life of a young boy named Salvador,

“Movies are dreams,” young Sammy Fabelman’s mother explains to him in the first few moments of The Fabelmans, “that you never forget.” But movies are also memories, and this is a different thing. The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s cinematic memoir about the childhood and adolescence he spent falling in love with film, is indeed about the

Virginia Woolf was the most distinguished of the four Englishwomen who welcomed Thomas Stearns Eliot. Her chief impetus to meet Eliot, backed by her husband, Leonard Woolf, was a result of the Egoist edition of his first volume of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations. Mary’s lover Clive Bell took a dozen copies to Garsington, and