Literature

March 29, 2022, 3:56pm New hero alert: Wong May, the winner of this year’s $165,000 Windham-Campbell Prize in poetry, who expressed surprise at the award given than she has consciously eschewed the literary world in favor of the work itself. On the Windham-Campbell website, Wong May has one of the all-time great response-to-prize quotes (big

‘The Door in the Wall’ is a short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), which was published in his 1911 collection The Door in the Wall and Other Stories. One of his most popular and widely studied short stories, ‘The Door in the Wall’ is about the conflict between our private, imaginative worlds we seek

TODAY: In 1920, the first run of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise sells out, three days after publication.    A look at Anton Chekhov’s beloved summer home in Ukraine, a “repository of hope” under threat amid Putin’s invasion. | Lit Hub “If fiction writing is the big game, journaling is lifting weights and

March 28, 2022, 12:40pm Eight months after the launch of Roxane Gay Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic seeking to publish “beautifully written, provocative, intelligent, [risky]” writing, Roxane Gay Books has announced its first list: it will publish three novels in 2023, from Ani Kayode Somtochukwu, J.V. Lyon, and Lindsay Hunter. Here are the three

‘The Witch’ is a short story by the American writer Shirley Jackson. The plot is very straightforward and the story runs to only a few pages, telling of how a mother travels on the train with her young son and baby daughter, and how a strange man strikes up a conversation with her son and

March 28, 2022, 10:00am Lit Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s debut story collection What We Fed to the Manticore, which will be published by Tin House this September. Tin House describes What We Fed to the Manticore as a collection that “takes readers inside the minds of a full cast of

West Side Story, the charged, nimble musical created by Leonard Bernstein (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Arthur Laurents (book), and Jerome Robbins (story and choreography) is one of the greatest artistic achievements of mankind. It is a blaze of sound and movement and feeling, full of pathos and gracefulness, indelible and ephemeral at the same time.

‘Where I’m Calling From’ is a short story by the American writer Raymond Carver, originally published in the New Yorker in 1982. The story is about a man trying to give up alcohol dependency in a rehabilitation centre, and his attempts to call his estranged wife and current girlfriend, hence the story’s title, ‘Where I’m

“It always makes me laugh when you do that,” said my husband after I’d finished ordering drinks at a restaurant one night. “Do what?” I asked. “Pronounce water that way.” He mimicked an American drawl. Wah-der. “You don’t sound like you.” “But when I sound like me, no one understands me.” In my accent, water

Originally published in the New York Saturday Press in 1865 under the title ‘Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog’, Mark Twain’s short story ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’ was one of his earliest pieces of writing and is probably his best-known short fiction. The story is widely studied and analysed in schools and

TODAY: In 1898, William Sydney Porter, also known as O. Henry, is imprisoned for embezzlement.    Your complete literary guide to the Oscar nominated films (plus some honorable mentions). | Lit Hub 2022 Oscars “My whole practical thesis around the craft of writing a sex scene is this: it is exactly the same as any

TODAY: In 1904, American author and mythology expert Joseph Campbell is born, thus beginning his hero’s journey.    How do we mourn without funerals? Olivia Clare Friedman considers grief without ritual. | Lit Hub Helen Humphreys reflects on the “slippage” between her world and Sylvia Plath’s. | Lit Hub Ridicule and redemption: What Hopi traditions of the “shame

‘One Art’ is a poem by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79), first published in the New Yorker in 1976 and included in her collection Geography III the following year. The poem, which is one of the most famous examples of the villanelle form, is titled ‘One Art’ because the poem is about Bishop’s attempts

March 25, 2022, 1:18pm On the topic of banned books (ha ha): as the Standard reported, the Charles Dickens Museum’s account is now visible on TikTok after a censorship mix-up, shadowban, and subsequent Twitter campaign to #FreeDickens. Anybody who has any experience with social media probably already understands how this happened: Charles Dickens, and thus

Sure, we’re a website about books—but does that preclude us from having opinions about movies? Nope! (Especially not when said films are based on books, which by our count is 50 percent of the Best Picture noms this year.) In advance of Sunday night’s ceremony, we’re recommending what to read (and watch) to complement the

‘The School’ is probably the best-known short story by the American writer Donald Barthelme (1931-89), whose work is sometimes labelled as ‘postmodernist’ (a label he was not entirely comfortable with, but which he accepted) and, occasionally, ‘metafiction’ (a label he was less happy with). Published in the New Yorker in 1974, ‘The School’ is a

Being a Ukrainian abroad and being a Ukrainian at home today represent two different kinds of pain. Iryna Shuvalova, a Ukrainian poet and literature scholar, traveled from her native Kyiv to China, where she works as a college counselor, as tanks began to appear on Ukraine’s borders. I pretend death doesn’t exist but death is

TODAY: In 1919, Lawrence Ferlinghetti is born.     “I pretend death doesn’t exist.” New contemporary Ukrainian poetry from Iryna Shuvalova, translated by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk. | Lit Hub Ukraine “Every childhood deserves a Boo Radley house and the Olympia Milk Bar was mine.” Madelaine Lucas on the “reclusive others” of childhood. | Lit