Perhaps no celebrity, on or off the screen, reflects the knife’s edge that ambitious women must navigate more powerfully than the Academy Award-winning actor Reese Witherspoon. Reflected in the characters Witherspoon has played over the course of her career, her turn to producing films, and her frank public comments are not only the maddening stereotypes
Literature
In March 2021, my mother, Nancy Bourne, a lifelong nonsmoker, died of lung cancer. Two weeks before that, though, as she cycled in and out of hospital wards, she was on her laptop sending off a flurry of query letters to literary agents asking for their help in selling her first novel. Six months before
Featured photograph by John Mackenzie. In May 1655, on an otherwise unremarkable day, Thomas Browne—physician and antiquarian—received a visitor. The visitor’s name is lost to history, but they brought with them between forty and fifty clay urns, now also lost, recently discovered buried in a field at Walsingham. Their provenance was a mystery, and Browne
This week’s leak of the Supreme Court vote to strike down Roe v. Wade decision caused waves of outrage across the land: The 1973 decision provided federal constitutional protections of abortion rights. Now it appeared women would be shorn of a guaranteed protection they had had for 49 years. For Alissa Quart, a journalist, producer,
TODAY: In 1893, English socialist, politician, and poet Margaret Isabel Cole (née Postgate) was born in Cambridge, England. Also on Lit Hub: Lara Bazelon on womanhood and ambition • Beppe Severgnini on the Italian love (and need) for poetry • Read Eyad Barghuthy’s “Curses” (tr. Nashwa Gowanlock)
April 29, 2022, 12:36pm In the exactly 170 years since the first edition of Roget’s thesaurus was published, thesauruses have been a great gift to writers the world over, from frantic high school students trying to subtly change someone else’s words so as not to get caught plagiarizing to poets who have already used “liminal”
‘Coal’ is a 1968 poem by the African-American poet Audre Lorde (1934-92). Lorde was a self-described ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.’ The ‘warrior’ is as important as the other words. Her poem ‘Coal’ is one of her most frequently anthologised, and sees Lorde harnessing the rage she feels when, for instance, she sees white people’s
April 29, 2022, 1:15pm A couple of years ago, I was back home in Brooklyn between college semesters and reading Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy for my experimental fiction class (yes, yes, eye roll away). I had just been lamenting to a friend that, while an egregious amount of books take place in Brooklyn, no
The following is an edited excerpt from a conversation with Courtney Balestier on WMFA, a show about creativity and craft, and first appeared in Lit Hub’s The Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. * I was having difficulty managing all of my research, and I was having difficulty with keeping track of my thinking. There was a
Ernest Hemingway’s 1925 short story ‘Cat in the Rain’ touches upon a number of themes, but it touches upon them lightly, for the most part. As is often the case in his fiction, Hemingway lets a few spare details suggest the inner lives of his characters, with these mostly external details hinting at much larger
April 28, 2022, 12:39pm The maestro of the motion capture suit Andy Serkis (aka Gollum aka King Kong aka Caesar the aggrieved chimp aka Supreme Leader Snoke aka Baloo the singing bear) is having quite the year. After directing the superhero flick Venom: Let There Be Carnage (which grossed a cool $500 million) and playing a
Some people chant, others focus on breathing, and a select few choose to listen to thrash metal in a pitch-black room, but when it comes to contemplating the career of Patrick Swayze, there’s no better place to start than by watching his filmography from start to finish. From his subdued and tender performances to the
Poetry can be used to say all sorts of things which affect us deeply: the love we feel for that special someone, or the gratitude we hold for someone who has been there and supported us. And so poems for best friends – best friends forever or ‘BFF’ in particular – are especially useful when
April 27, 2022, 2:46pm April 27, 1988 is a very important date. It marks the day we went from a world without Lizzo to a world with Lizzo. (Honestly, it should be a national holiday.) In honor of the iconic singer/songwriter/flutist/shapewear designer, I give you: book recommendations based on your favorite feel-good song. Happy birthday,
The texts and emails started right away. Earlier this spring, when Julia, an HBO Max original series “inspired by Julia Child’s extraordinary life and her long-running television series, The French Chef,” premiered, I began getting questions from writers, editors, colleagues and friends. Did that actually happen? No one was writing to ask me about Julia
‘The Mocking-Bird’ is an 1891 short story by the American author Ambrose Bierce, who is also remembered for his witty The Devil’s Dictionary and for his mysterious disappearance in around 1914. ‘The Mocking-Bird’ is a Civil War tale about a soldier who shoots a man while on sentry duty at night, and struggles to find
April 26, 2022, 10:08am Many in Oregon’s literary community are dismayed that poet Carl Adamshick has just been awarded a $10,000 fellowship from Literary Arts. According to this thoroughly reported article at The Oregonian, Adamshick left his position as director of Tavern Books—which he co-founded—after multiple financial improprieties were discovered: Tavern Books’ former managing editor,
When it comes to fiction, I can’t write about a place until I’ve left it. Over the years, I’ve found that I require some distance—sometimes psychic, sometimes literal—from my subject and the setting in which the story occurs. I’m a huge fan of what some writers like to call composting, wherein an author will allow