Literature

The following is a story from Jem Calder’s Reward System, an ultra-contemporary and electrifyingly fresh collection of fictions about work, relationships, and the strange loop of technology and the self. Calder was born in Cambridge, and lives and works in London. His first two completed stories were published in The Stinging Fly and Granta. That

The English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was prolific over the course of his long life and career, although he wrote virtually no new poetry after he was appointed UK Poet Laureate in 1843. But between the early 1790s and the late 1800s, the most productive period of his career, Wordsworth wrote some of the

July 18, 2022, 10:13am Over the weekend—via a tweet from artist Amber Blade Jones, because the garbage bird website has its bright spots—I discovered Not/But, a comic strip that speaks directly to my self-defeating writer soul. Not/But is a series created by illustrator and comics artist Tonči Zonjić; it originally ran weekly between 2016 and

I was lined up in a mall outside a jungle gym, braving the closed-circuit plumes of COVID to tire out my kids on a glorified cat scratch tower, when I heard the child behind us ask, “Daddy, why do those kids have masks? Do I need one?” The child was talking about my kids. “Oh,

We always want what we can’t have. A Keen On guest last month told me that she wants artificial intelligence that can deliver more human empathy. But only we humans have empathy. Understanding and sharing the feelings of others is our superpower. And in tomorrow’s age of ubiquitous smart machines, it’s the one thing that

Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea, CJ Hauser’s The Crane Wife, and Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ The Man Who Could Move Clouds all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.” * Fiction 1. Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield(Flatiron

TODAY: In 1927, Theodor Geisel publishes his first cartoon as Dr. Seuss. “He was known as the improbably well-informed Yankee who had a preternatural ability to sniff out genius—and bring it to the United States.” On John Quinn, the man who introduced America to Pablo Picasso. | Lit Hub Art “Like life, writing forces a series of

Criticism of economic growth is almost as old as the phenomenon of economic growth itself. But the term “degrowth,” as it is used today, can be traced to relatively recent beginnings. Let us take a short look at its history. Some traditions of growth criticism date back to the late 18th century and ranged from

Robert Frost (1874-1963) is one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, whose work remains popular. Poems such as ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ and ‘The Road Not Taken’ are widely quoted, taught, studied, and loved. These poems have also given us some well-known quotations. But what are Robert Frost’s most

July 15, 2022, 11:15am A handwritten letter from J.R.R. Tolkien is currently up for auction, with bidding beginning at $5,000, if you’ve got that kind of cash lying around. The letter, which is dated April 12, 1956, is a response to a fan, and discusses both his inspiration for The Lord of the Rings universe

A single woman is drinking alone, crying over a man. She’s probably pining for her lost girlhood, the spotlight glow of youth and the gazes that gravitate to a girl bathing in it. These days, she’s sobbing in a bathtub, wallowing in her romantic regrets. Luckily, she still has her incisive eye and sarcastic tongue.

‘The Cop and the Anthem’ is a short story by the US short-story writer O. Henry, whose real name was William Sydney Porter (1862-1910). His stories are characterised by their irony, their occasional sentimentality, and by their surprise twist endings. ‘The Cop and the Anthem’ contains all three of these key elements of an O.

July 14, 2022, 10:30am Well, we still have some nice things—or rather, dogs do. While walking through my neighborhood in Missoula recently (a neighborhood that features seven Little Free Libraries for humans, it should be said), I stumbled across a very cute sight: some good Samaritan (by the looks of it, a small one) created a

I grew up thinking I didn’t matter, that no one cared what I had to say. The world didn’t see me, a daughter of working-class Mexican immigrants, and what it did see, it considered disposable, inconsequential. I rarely found portrayals of anyone like me—bookish and poor and surly and Brown—in the art that I enjoyed.

Conversion and redemption are both important aspects of religion, and these terms can also be useful in other, more secular realms. What does it mean to be redeemed? How can religion, or some other force, offer us a second chance? The following poems explore the issues of conversion and redemption in different ways, dating from

July 13, 2022, 2:46pm On July 13, 1930, some six thousand people crammed themselves into London’s Royal Albert Hall. They had come to hear a missive from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the spiritualist, physician, and creator of Sherlock Holmes—who had, as it happens, died six days previous. The hall had been rented out by the

When I was eight or nine, my grandmother was living in a house in a sleepy Essex suburb. I often visited her with my younger siblings in tow, and we used to spend much of our stay in the garden. Granny’s garden was her pride and joy, kept as neat as a guardsman’s coat, the

‘The Other Side of the Hedge’ is a short story by E. M. Forster (1879-1970), who is probably best-known for novels like Howards End and A Passage to India. However, Forster was also a master of the short story and used the form to explore some of his more metaphysical ideas about humanity, progress, technology,