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
Literature
September 1, 2022, 11:14am In case you haven’t read mainstream periodical, Substack, lifestyle website, or know-it-all’s Twitter feed in the past two years: we’re all suffering from burnout. In fact, in a way, the real villain was burnout all along. Armed with this knowledge, I decided to revisit some literary characters who are traditionally considered
Artist/JRR Tolkien devotee Jenna Kass and TV critic/fantasy philistine Dylan Roth are a married couple who have joined forces to review the new original series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Can this latest on-screen voyage to Middle Earth satisfy both a diehard with the wisdom of the Eldar and your average
‘What is Enlightenment?’, full title ‘Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, is a 1784 essay by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). As the longer title suggests, Kant’s essay is a response to a question (posed by a clergyman, Reverend Johann Friedrich Zöllner) concerning the nature of philosophical enlightenment. What is enlightenment, and how best might
August 31, 2022, 4:15pm As a wild colonial I may not have a firm grasp on the rules of succession, but when a reigning monarch dies, doesn’t the title get passed down? Well, apparently if the title in question is totally made-up, subjective, and confers no earthly dominion, it does not. Crime writer extraordinaire Val
If hard-line, race-based immigration restrictions were a deviation from the Reagan era, an opposition to Great Society civil rights and poverty programs, particularly those aimed at helping Black Americans, seemed very much like a continuation of it. But the new writing on Black Americans, inequality, and government intervention deviated sharply from Reagan’s libertarian-minded approach. Reagan
August 30, 2022, 1:30pm Saturday Night Live recently solicited recommendations for hosts, via the show’s Twitter. Whether this was a genuine request or a bid for engagement is anyone’s guess—I’m going with the engagement because I have no joy in my heart—but regardless of intent, I do have some thoughts. It should obviously be a writer,
August 30, 2022, 4:55am Don’t walk—run—to your local bookstore/library today! * Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto is Back(Ballantine) “Carrie Soto’s deep dive into women’s tennis may be the most ambitious. It’s the perfect novel to close out your summer, and whether Carrie defeats Nicki Chan is almost secondary.”–The Washington Post Mia Mercado, She’s Nice Though(HarperOne)
What are the best short stories which are set in school, or which focus on school and one’s schooldays? There are plenty of stories which are ‘set in schools’ in the sense of being set reading for schoolchildren, but it’s harder to find some canonical and classic short stories which are about schooldays. The following
August 29, 2022, 10:32am With design elements inspired by nearby Tiantai Mountain and the Haishan Islands, a new bookstore in Taizhou City (on China’s central coast) is putting all our cute little corner bookshops to shame. This article was posted in English but is essentially a long string of AI-translated text-fragments, amounting to something like
August 26, 2022, 11:37am As some of you may already know (and sure, some of you may not care) Bob Dylan is publishing a book this November about his “philosophy of modern song” called… The Philosophy of Modern Song. If you are among those who do care (like me) the table of contents of the
August 26, 2022, 11:48am Congratulations to Tess Gunty, whose critically acclaimed debut novel The Rabbit Hutch has just won the inaugural Waterstones debut fiction prize. The novel (about four teenagers—recently aged out of the state foster-care system—living together in an apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest), was selected as winner by a panel of Waterstones
August 26, 2022, 11:49am Anne Hathaway, in my eyes, can do no wrong. She captured our childhood hearts in Ella Enchanted and The Princess Diaries. She made us laugh in Get Smart and cry in Les Mis. Most importantly, she prepared us for the grueling years we’d endure as assistants in The Devil Wears Prada. The hits just keep
TODAY: In 1856, Ivan Franko, author of the first detective novels and modern poetry in the Ukrainian language, is born. Jincy Willett on how (and why) to base a character on yourself. | Lit Hub Craft “Why take a cast of a dead person’s face when so many people cannot bear to look at the
August 26, 2022, 12:03pm Sometime around 2006, everyone in publishing began to lament the death of the book section. In the face of declining readership, budget cuts, and mergers, newspapers began to realize that book review sections did not bring in enough ad revenue to cover their costs and so cut and culled until there
Love is obviously a key subject in much classic poetry. But what are the best sensual love poems ever written: those poems which carry an erotic frisson which speaks of desire as well as devotion? Below, we select and introduce some of the very best sensual love poems which are more than just conventional love
August 26, 2022, 1:39pm May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan. Just ahead of its premiere at the Venice Film Festival next week, the first trailer for White Noise—Noah Baumbach’s black comedy apocalyptic disaster film based on the 1985 novel by Don DeLillo—has finally
August 24, 2022, 11:09am Jesus. A Texas woman actually went into her local police station—in a town called Katy, just west of Houston—to file a complaint about a book in the Jordan High School library. According to the Houston Chronicle: A Katy ISD police officer temporarily removed a copy of a book from a high