August 3, 2022, 9:18am A bookseller who fled Hong Kong because of Chinese repression is going to plead his case to Nancy Pelosi during her headline-making visit to Taiwan. Lam Wing-kee, a longtime human rights activist and bookstore owner in Hong Kong, was jailed for eight months in 2015 for selling books critical of Chinese
Literature
‘Babylon Revisited’ is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1931. Dealing with some of the prominent themes of Fitzgerald’s most famous work, The Great Gatsby, ‘Babylon Revisited’ is about alienation, guilt, dissipation, and making amends, among other themes. ‘Babylon Revisited’: plot summary The story centres
August 2, 2022, 2:19pm A lawsuit over Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water and New York state prisons is just the latest example of states’ absurd approach to literature in prisons, a phenomenon that PEN America has called “the largest book ban policy in the United States.” Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison
August 2, 2022, 9:33am Just look at them: all these new books, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and waiting for you to give them a good home. They promise to make excellent company. * Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different(Viking) “A bildungsroman, a gorgeous queer love story, and a musing on labor and immigration. But
John Donne (1572-1631) is one of the most important and influential poets in the English language. He is widely regarded as the first metaphysical poet, whose work combined then-contemporary developments in astronomy and cosmology to create a new poetic language with which poets could describe love, relationships, and a host of emotions. Below, we select
August 1, 2022, 9:04am Yep, you guessed it: “Barefoot Bookseller,” the greatest job in the literary world, is once again accepting applications. Would you like to run a bookstore on a desert island in the Maldives for a year? What if I told you that you weren’t allowed to wear shoes . . . or
Translated from the Ukrainian by Kate Tsurkan In the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, where I was born and raised, most people spoke Russian. It was my native language, too, since my parents spoke it to me. I read my very first books in this language. Various subjects were taught in this language at school,
TODAY: In 1918, Mary Lee Settle, the 1978 National Book Award winner (for Blood Tie) and a founder of the annual PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, is born. “The US immigration system knows I am here. I shudder to think where my information is stored within the government apparatus and for what purpose.” Luz Aguirre
July 29, 2022, 11:04am Yes, it’s Tingle Time. One of my all-time favorite literary personalities, the greatest self-published author to ever live, Chuck Tingle, has signed a two-novel deal with Tor’s Nightfire imprint. Per the Publishers Marketplace announcement, the first book, Camp Damascus, is about “a group of queer friends who begin to realize their
TODAY: In 1818, Emily Brontë, seen here in a portrait made by her brother Branwell, is born. “How is our work circulated in a marketplace that struggles not just to see all of its writers as equals, but to pay them as equals?” Elaine Castillo reckons with the problems at the heart of publishing. |
Writers of short stories have said a great deal about relationships of various kinds, and although the novel may be the preferred form for teasing out the complexities and conflicts of a long-term relationship, the short-story form can also provide writers with enough space to pinpoint a particular critical moment in a relationship, a moment
July 29, 2022, 12:49pm The Princess Diaries was first released on this day in 2001, and because it’s based on a book, that officially means I can write about it for literary hub dot com and no one can stop me. My fellow ’90s babies need no recap of this hit movie, but for the
July 29, 2022, 9:00am July 30 is officially Paperback Book Day! It’s apparently the day that Penguin started publishing paperbacks, way back in 1935. And what a glorious day it was! Who doesn’t love paperbacks? They feel so nice in your hands! They fit so conveniently into your bag! Curious about the history behind the
‘Fat’ is a short story by the American writer Raymond Carver. In just a few pages, Carver’s narrator recounts the day she served a very large man who came into the diner where she works as a waitress. Seeing this man inspires a number of feelings in the narrator, although their significance requires careful analysis
July 28, 2022, 4:40pm Watched by all. Seen by none. As I wrote last month when the first teaser trailer dropped, hopes are high for Andrew Domink’s NC-17 adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ gargantuan work of historical bio-fiction. Now, with the release of an action-packed full-length trailer (in which we get our first glimpses of Bobby
TODAY: In 1866, notable friend of animals Beatrix Potter is born. “The rings of Saturn share a structure with the way we think, the way I write, floating from part to part, cell to cell, ice crystal to ice crystal across the synapse.” In the first of a new series, 13 Ways of Looking,
A ‘quest’ is defined by the OED as ‘A search or pursuit in order to find something; the action of searching’. Poets have often used the quest motif to discuss all manner of subjects, from religion to nobility to that most important thing, the quest we as individuals take to find ourselves. The following poems
July 27, 2022, 10:00am Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Szilvia Molnar’s debut novel, The Nursery, forthcoming from Pantheon in March 2023. The novel, a “visceral and revelatory portrait of a woman struggling with maternal fear and its looming madness,” follows a translator at home with her new baby, Button. Here’s the