Literature

It’s March, a month past my fourteenth birthday, and I still haven’t gotten it. My mother reminds me that she was sixteen. How humiliating! Or maybe she was glad because in her day they didn’t have sanitary pads and had to use rags. Rags that had to be washed and dried, then used again, and

November 1, 2022, 10:30am In a particularly heinous act of literary graverobbing a guy named Johnny Teague—a pastor and businessman running for congress in Texas’s 7th district—has written a “sequel” to The Diaries of Anne Frank. Yup. According to Jewish Telegraphic Agency: The Lost Diary of Anne Frank, imagines the famous Jewish Holocaust victim’s final

TODAY: In 1956, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems is published by City Lights Books. “Even—or perhaps particularly—in the land of my ancestors, I am expected to be the servant and not the guest.” Dionne Irving considers tourism and the remnants of empire in Jamaica. | Lit Hub Travel 18 new books to kick off your

‘The Village’ is a chapter from Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden; or, Life in the Woods. The book details Thoreau’s decision to leave behind modern civilisation and live a simple life in the woods in Massachusetts. In the chapter titled ‘The Village’, which can be read here, Thoreau describes his regular visits to the

October 31, 2022, 1:34pm There’s something about short stories that screams Halloween to me; I think it’s because they’re the perfect length to be read around a campfire, or with a flashlight in hand on a dark and stormy night. And because there is nothing scarier than the rampant and irresponsible consolidation of big corporate

Another month of books, another month of book covers. Maybe it’s all the orange and black assaulting my vision when I step out the door, but this month, I’ve been responding to simplicity and elegance—and, as always, humor. Can never have too much of that. Here are my favorite book covers of October. H.D., HERmione;

Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts, George Saunders’ Liberation Day, Paul Newman’s The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, and Annie Ernaux’s Getting Lost all feature among the best reviewed books of the month. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.” * Fiction 1. Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng(Penguin Press)

The following is an excerpt from My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing by Carl Phillips and appeared in Lit Hub’s The Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. I woke early—looked up, then out, out into the un-silence that I call silence, what maybe doesn’t exist. Here, in a stand of

TODAY: In 1903, Evelyn Waugh is born.    Narratives everywhere all at once: How stories came to dominate every facet of our lives (for better and for worse). | Lit Hub Criticism “For the first time, Joanne and I could do what we longed for years to do in public.” Paul Newman on the “lusty

TODAY: In 1911, Joseph Pulitzer is born.    “I used to think authors who spent 20 years writing a book must be sad, pathetic creatures.” Devoney Looser on writing (slowly) about sister-novelists Jane and Anna Maria Porter. | Lit Hub Craft & Advice The most important poem of the 20th century: On T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

‘The Voice from the Wall’ is a story from Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club. The story is narrated by Lena St. Clair, the daughter of a Chinese mother and an Anglo-Irish father living in California. Before we offer an analysis of Tan’s story, and explain why the story has the title ‘The

October 28, 2022, 9:45am Listen. It’s Friday, and things aren’t great. But here’s something nice for you: a collection of frowning, eye-rolling, dead-panning literary types holding on to adorable animals. Like I said, it’s Friday. The real question is—how could you be so grumpy whilst in the company of these A+ furballs? We may never

The following is from Zsolt Láng’s The Birth of Emma K.. Láng is a Hungarian author, essayist, playwright, and editor from Transylvania, Romania. He has published five short-story collections and five novels and one work of criticism. His most recent novel Bolyai won the 2020 Libri Literary Prize, one of Hungary’s most prestigious literary awards.

October 27, 2022, 1:05pm By now, perhaps you’re aware of the kerfuffle over the two (2) separate instances in Matthew Perry’s forthcoming memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, in which he takes extremely cheap shots at Keanu Reeves in the context of lamenting the untimely deaths of Heath Ledger, River Phoenix, and Chris

Sylvia Plath is the sort of writer for whom the idiom, “I’d read her grocery lists” was conceived. On this point, however, she has an edge: You can, indeed, read her grocery lists. Plath’s journals, published posthumously, are filled with granular detail: Amidst dramatic entries on feminist doctrines and suicidal ideation, she penned shopping lists,

‘I Have a Dream’ is one of the greatest speeches in American history. Delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-68) in Washington D.C. in 1963, the speech is a powerful rallying cry for racial equality and for a fairer and equal world in which African Americans will be as free as white Americans. If you’ve

October 26, 2022, 9:30am Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Michael Chang’s Synthetic Jungle: Poems, their latest poetry collection forthcoming from Curbstone Books. Chang’s poetry has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. In 2021, they were awarded the Poetry Project’s prestigious Brannan Prize.  Synthetic