When I first speak with novelist William Brewer, he is wearing a blue-black trucker’s hat that reads Gene’s Beer Garden, Morgantown WV and is insisting that he did not set out to write the Great West Virginia Novel. “I think any attempt to write the Great Anything is a bad idea. It’s a distinctly American
Literature
John Keats (1795-1821) is one of the greatest poets in the English language, and one of the most famous Romantic poets. In just a few years prior to his untimely death from tuberculosis, aged just 25, in 1821, Keats wrote some of the most memorable poems about everything from art to autumn to melancholy to
On today’s episode of The Literary Life, special guest Amanda Keeley is joined by Ottessa Moshfegh to discuss her latest novel, Lapvona, out now from Penguin Press. From the episode: Ottessa Moshfegh: Why do I write about such darkness? I guess my first my first thought is … I kind of see myself as part
TODAY: In 1902, the Romanian-language literary review Luceafărul begins publication in Budapest. What do Jane Austen, Michael Pollan, and Mean Girls have in common? They’re all part of the literary film and TV streaming in July. | Lit Hub Film & TV 19 new paperbacks to stuff (nicely) in your tote bag. | The Hub
July 1, 2022, 9:30am Paperbacks—so lightweight, so convenient, so perfect to accompany you to the beach or wherever you’re off to this summer. Here are a few of those we’ll be toting this month: * Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch(Anchor Books, July 5) “[W]hat makes Nightbitch stand apart from the usual early motherhood stories, teeth and all,
July 1, 2022, 11:22am Salman Rushdie—the former PEN America President and Booker Prize-winning author of Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, and Joseph Anton—just sold a new novel, and it sounds like a doozy. Billed as a translation of an ancient Indian myth, Victory City—Rushdie’s fifteenth novel, his first since 2019’s Quichotte—is the story of “a
TODAY: In 1971, Canadian poet, memoirist, and novelist Evelyn Lau is born. “Legislating reproductive rights remains a hallmark of authoritarian and fascist governments.” Siri Hustvedt on the malign philosophies—and bad history—behind the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. | Lit Hub Politics Looking to Beowulf and other myths to understand the origins of early medieval England. | Lit Hub History “This sounds
July 1, 2022, 12:50pm Or could you? I hadn’t heard of the Lyttle Lytton Bad Sentence Contest (run by Adam Cadre for 22 years!) till this morning, but poring over this year’s winners, coffee in hand, was just the break from doomscrolling I needed. Ranging from the politically timely—“The doors of my heart were as
What are the best short stories about the theme of motherhood? And who are the best mother characters in short fiction? Below, we select and introduce some of the most famous, and most widely studied, short stories which deal with the subject of mothers and motherhood. These stories range from female-authored to male-authored works, from
July 1, 2022, 1:08pm Jesmyn Ward—the two-time National Book Award-winning author of Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing—has just become, at 45, the youngest ever winner of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. The prize, which was established in 2008 as a lifetime achievement award, honors “an American literary writer whose body
TODAY: In 1936, Algerian novelist, translator, and filmmaker Assia Djebar is born. “Maybe / it’s up to us, the crawling vines, to set roots for our homeland.” New poetry by Ostap Slyvynsky, translated from the Ukrainian by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk. | Lit Hub Ukraine Beyond Watermelon Sugar: Matt Mitchell explores the Richard Brautigan
Modernist literature is often concerned with modernity as a kind of living death, but perhaps no twentieth-century writer offered a more explicit parable of this fact than Franz Kafka in ‘The Hunter Gracchus’. This story, which exists as a brief six-page tale and an even shorter fragment, was among the posthumous papers which Kafka’s friend
June 30, 2022, 11:59am In another example of this country being thrust back into the past, two books are currently on trial in Virginia for obscenity: Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir Gender Queer (“This heartfelt graphic memoir relates, with sometimes painful honesty, the experience of growing up non-gender-conforming.” –Publisher’s Weekly) and Sarah J. Maas’ fantasy novel A
June 29, 2022, 2:52pm Today, AIGA, the professional association for design, announced the winners of their annual 50 Books | 50 Covers competition. Jurists Silas Munro (Jury Chair), Laura Coombs, Brian Johnson, and Kimberly Varella reviewed 605 book and cover design entries from 29 countries to arrive at their final list. “In a challenging year
If there is a ‘Shakespeare of the ghost story’, it is surely Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936), better known to legions of ghost-story readers as M. R. James. No other writer of the ghost story has managed to summon the haunting aspects of the distant past quite so effectively and unnervingly as James. Indeed, he is
June 29, 2022, 12:46pm Alta Journal just released a map for the Western bookstore road trip of my dreams: it’s a guide to indie bookstores on the West coast (with a few options from the desert and other non-coastal spots thrown in, because why not). A lot of the picks, as to be expected, are
June 28, 2022, 1:03pm Living in New York is great because there are cool things happening all the time. (Quick shoutout to the Center for Fiction’s Indie Press Summer Fridays series, which is free to attend!) But it’s also expensive as hell and bullshit that so much of publishing is centered here. So if you pay
‘The House of Asterion’ is one of the shortest stories by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Even by his usual standards – many of his best-known stories stretch to only a few pages – it is a shorter tale among his oeuvre, running to just three pages in most editions. Published in 1947,