October 18, 2022, 11:18am I can’t recall a wartime leader ever addressing an international book fair while his country is under attack but, hey, it’s already been a hell of a decade, so why not? This coming Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will make video remarks to the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is featuring a
Literature
October 17, 2022, 5:30pm The winner of the 2022 Booker Prize is Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sort Of Books). (The bookies almost had it.) The announcement was made by Neil MacGregor, Chair of the 2022 judges, in a ceremony at the Roundhouse, London, on
‘The Man I Killed’ is a story from The Things They Carried, a 1990 collection of linked short stories by the American writer Tim O’Brien. The collection focuses on a platoon of American soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War. As the title of this short story suggests, ‘The Man I Killed’ is about a man
October 17, 2022, 12:04pm Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu’s National Book Award-winning satirical novel, is coming to TV. Late last week Variety reported that streaming behemoth Hulu has placed a 10-episode order for the miniseries adaptation, which will star Jimmy O. Yang (Silicon Valley, Crazy Rich Asians) as Wilis Wu, a “Generic Asian Man” stuck playing “Background Oriental Male”
Catherine Called Birdy arrives in a Lena Dunham nadir. Since Girls aired its last episode in 2017, Dunham has virtually retreated from public life—and who could blame her? While her zeitgeist-grabbing brainchild exerted its outsize grip on our culture during its run on HBO from 2012 to 2017, Dunham’s voice was ubiquitous, practically inescapable. The
Perhaps this matters, in considering my happiness: I’m in love. The kind that begins in an instant, quick as a wink—in this case, he actually winks. The kind that begins as a crush and continues: I’m crushed and crushed again. Such insistence has a thrill to it, a pleasure: I’ve always loved having my blood
In anticipation of this year’s Durham Book Festival, which runs from October 13 to 16, the festival invited five acclaimed international authors to write to them about their daily struggles, joys, and concerns. This letter from Kateryna Babkina, translated from the Ukranian by Hanna Leliv, discusses the intersection of language and migration in light of
TODAY: In 1922, T. S. Eliot founds The Criterion magazine, the first issue of which contains his poem The Waste Land. Robert Pinsky reflects on poetry and social class, and outgrowing his “dissenting first impression” of Robert Lowell. | Lit Hub Poetry “In my most cynical moments, I wonder if the return to literary moralism isn’t
TODAY: In 1893, British poet May Wedderburn Cannan is born. Jacqueline Woodson, Helen Phillips, and more contemporary writers reflect on 75 years of Goodnight Moon. | Lit Hub “I still have to run, no matter how hard I try to choose synonyms, or search for euphemisms or sophisticated wordings to avoid the word refugee.” A
‘Half and Half’ is one of the stories from Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club. Told by a Chinese American woman named Rose Hsu Jordan, ‘Half and Half’ incorporates two stories from the narrator’s life: the breakdown of her marriage to an American man named Ted, and an incident from her childhood when
October 14, 2022, 11:54am Craig Finn is the lead singer of a band called The Hold Steady and I have always loved his songwriting. Finn is something like a poet laureate of Midwestern malaise, extracting tragicomic pathos from a particular kind of exurban fuckery that speaks to my southern Ontario upbringing. So many of Finn’s
October 13, 2022, 12:59pm The T. S. Eliot Prize, the prestigious literary prize that honors new poetry collections in the UK, has announced its shortlist of 10 books. Judges Jean Sprackland, Hannah Lowe and Roger Robinson determined the shortlist from a record submission pool of 201 books; each of the poets on the shortlist will
October 13, 2022, 1:32pm L’Engle-lovin’ theater kids of the world, rejoice: a stage musical of A Wrinkle in Time, one of the most acclaimed and beloved children’s books of the 20th century, is in the works. The adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbury Award-winning 1962 novel about a girl who travels through space and time to rescue
October 12, 2022, 11:00am Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Jai Chakrabarti’s A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, forthcoming from Penguin Random House in February 2023. The book, comprised of 14 short stories, details what family means today across cultures, continents, and faith. The title story, set in Kolkata in the 1980s,
‘Village People’ is a short story by Bessie Head (1937-86), a South African writer who, though born in South Africa, is usually considered Botswana’s most influential writer, having moved there in 1964. The story is narrated by a young girl living in Botswana in the Kalahari Desert, where rain rarely falls and hunger and drought
October 12, 2022, 12:51pm John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has announced the 25 recipients of its 2022 fellowships (colloquially known as the “genius grant”), and as ever, the group represents a fascinating array of people at the tops of their diverse fields. This year’s group includes a jazz cellist and composer, an astrodynamicist,
You’re tuning into another dimension. A dimension of tweets and the writers who send them. You have just now entered the Twitterverse. Each week, Gabe Hudson welcomes one of his favorite writers and pulls four of their tweets. The guest reads one of those tweets out loud. Then Gabe and the guest use that tweet
October 11, 2022, 12:45pm The Paris Review has announced that Vivian Gornick will receive the 2023 Hadada Award, which recognizes lifetime achievement and is given to “a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” Mona Simpson, publisher of The Paris Review, praised Gornick in a statement