Literature

May 10, 2022, 9:35am Look, The Joshua Tree was the first album I ever bought with my own money. I have a soft spot for U2, up to and including Achtung Baby (I guess). And I suppose a memoir by one of the biggest rock stars of a generation is to be expected, particularly one

May 9, 2022, 3:44pm The winners and nominated finalists of the 106th Pulitzer Prizes were announced today via remote video stream. The winners each take home $15,000 dollars and serious bragging rights, not to mention an instant ticket into a very illustrious club. The full list of winners and nominated finalists from the arts &

‘The Immortal’ is one of Jorge Luis Borges’ best-known and most widely studied short stories. Published in his collection The Aleph in 1949, ‘The Immortal’ takes the form of a ‘found’ manuscript purporting to be written by a Roman soldier who, nearly two thousand years ago, discovered a river which bestowed immortality upon any who

May 9, 2022, 1:56pm Earlier this morning Lit Hub published a very personal essay by Jumi Bello about her experience writing a debut novel, her struggles with severe mental illness, the self-imposed pressures a young writer can feel to publish, and her own acts of plagiarism. Because of inconsistencies in the story and, crucially, a

‘Scar’ is the story of An-mei Hsu, one of the inset tales included in Amy Tan’s 1989 book The Joy Luck Club. One of the shortest stories in the book, ‘Scar’ is largely plotless, and takes as its focus a Chinese-American woman’s memories of her childhood in China, where she was raised by her grandmother

‘The Fun They Had’ is a short story by the Russian-born American writer Isaac Asimov (1920-92). Like Asimov’s novel The Naked Sun (which we have analysed here), this story is one that has taken on new significance in the wake of 2020 and the shift to remote learning and working, and the themes of this

TODAY: In 1940, Angela Carter is born.    Also on Lit Hub: Yiyun Li on the solaces (and limits) of music • Hernan Diaz on learning from Borges • Why Roe v. Wade was just the beginning • Seven contemporary writers on the literature of abortion • Marcia DeSanctis tries to reconcile her love of Russian lit with Putin’s ascendancy

May 6, 2022, 2:15pm Once in a while, you come across a short story that just puts a spell on you. You reach the end of it, and you find yourself a little changed, and you want to turn back to the beginning and read it over—even more carefully—line by line to look for clues

‘The Shawl’ is the best-known and most widely studied short story by the American writer Cynthia Ozick (born 1928). Published in 1980, ‘The Shawl’ is about a Jewish mother and her infant daughter and niece, living in Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War. The story contains some very harrowing imagery and is noteworthy for

Discoveries can take many forms: an explorer discovering a new land, an astronomer discovering a whole new planet or galaxy, or a poet discovering the truth about love, nature, or even, for that matter, truth itself. The following ten poems are our pick of the best ‘discovery’ poems: poems which are about people discovering things,

‘The Jockey’ is a short story by the American writer Carson McCullers (1917-67). McCullers wrote ‘The Jockey’ in 1941, when she was just 24 years old. The story is about a jockey named Bitsy Barlow, who confronts his trainer while the man is dining with a bookmaker and a rich man, about an accident involving

‘An Astrologer’s Day’ is a story from the Indian author R. K. Narayan’s 1943 collection Malgudi Days. The Malgudi of the collection’s title is a fictional city in India, where all of the stories in the collection take place. The opening story in the book, ‘An Astrologer’s Day’ is about an unnamed astrologer who is

‘Still I Rise’ is a poem by the American poet Maya Angelou (1928-2014), published in her 1978 collection And Still I Rise. A kind of protest poem which is defiant as well as celebratory, ‘Still I Rise’ is about the power of the human spirit to overcome discrimination and hardship, with Angelou specifically reflecting her

“Then almost at the edge of town, on our way to the Trade Mart where we were going to have the luncheon, we were rounding a curve, going down a hill, and suddenly there was a sharp loud report—a shot. It seemed to me to come from a building right above my shoulder. Then a

Open Source is the world’s longest-running podcast. Christopher Lydon circles the big ideas in culture, the arts and politics with the smartest people in the world. It’s the kind of curious, critical, high-energy conversation we’re all missing nowadays. Try this to get a fresh grip on the war in Ukraine and its effects still to

Is the notion of “authenticity” a fiction? Back in 2010, the Canadian writer Andrew Potter published a book entitled The Authenticity Hoax suggesting that the more we search for what he calls “real things,” the more lost we become. Authenticity is a hoax, Potter argued, because, for all its promise of reality, it is anything

In 1986, after nine years as director of an abortion clinic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Jeanne Clark was ready for a change. She loved running the clinic—managing the staff, supporting the patients, serving the community. She also experienced the darker side of working in the abortion rights movement. Thankfully, no one was home when her house

“Bad” mothers—mothers with complex inner lives and competing priorities who do not always do right by their children—are having a moment in fiction and film. A full sixty years after Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook was first published to the shock-horror of many, a reaction provoked in part by its depiction of “free” (as in,