This letter begins on a night just before my father dies. Back when he could still walk, we might have been on the porch sharing a cigarette, confessing our last words before sleep to a congregation of stars. Instead, we’re in the living room of the ranch house in Arizona. The credits roll on yet
Literature
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘You Belong with Me’ is a Taylor Swift song, which featured on her second studio album, Fearless (2008). Swift wrote the song with Liz Rose and produced it with Nathan Chapman. Although ‘You Belong with Me’ has a ‘story’ at its heart which is hardly new, the lyrics to
May 26, 2023, 10:00am According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we recommend: “Stone
TODAY: In 1936, John Steinbeck’s dog, Toby, eats (half of) the first draft of Of Mice and Men. Susanna Kaysen revisits Girl, Interrupted 30 years later: “Back then, this was not a topic for discussion, rather something to be kept secret.” | Lit Hub Memoir “What my grandmothers gave me, I now offer to you.” Kwame Alexander considers the legacies
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Unique’ is a strange word. It’s often assumed that there are no true synonyms for unique, because the word literally presupposes that the thing or person described as ‘unique’ is truly one of a kind, rather than simply rare. ‘Unique’, some people declare, is a unique word. But this
Master Gardener is the third in Paul Schrader’s “God’s Lonely Men” trilogy, in each film of which a weary middle-aged man who has previously experienced alienation from mainstream society contends with his haunted past and hazy future, reflecting on these things, and his rote daily existence, via diary-keeping—a technique that suffices until his world is
The following is from R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface. Kuang is a Marshall Scholar, Chinese-English translator, and the Astounding Award-winning and the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award nominated author of the Poppy War trilogy and Babel. Her work has won the Crawford Award and the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. She has
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Blind Dog’ is a story from Malgudi Days, the short-story collection by the Indian writer R. K. Narayan (1906-2001). This short tale is about a blind beggar who is befriended by a stray dog; the man puts the dog on a lead and uses him to navigate his
May 25, 2023, 1:31pm Raymond Carver, one of the most beloved and influential short story writers in the history of American fiction, was born eighty-five years ago today. Below is a New York Times review of Carver’s final story collection, Where I’m Calling From, written by future Pulitzer Prize (and Orange Prize, and NBCC Prize, and
The following is from Emma Törzs’ Ink Blood Sister Scribe. Törzs is a writer, teacher, and occasional translator based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her fiction has been honored with an NEA fellowship in prose, a World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, and an O. Henry Prize. Her stories have been published in journals such as Ploughshares,
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Monday’s Child’ is the title sometimes given to a short children’s rhyme, which has been popular for several centuries. Lines such as ‘Monday’s child is fair of face’ and ‘Wednesday’s child is full of woe’ have become well-known; but what was the purpose of this song or poem? Perhaps
May 24, 2023, 2:50pm People simply must pick a lane: poetry is either impenetrable and outdated, or it’s a dangerous gateway drug to reverse racism. Florida, you cannot have it both ways! Politico reports today that an elementary school in the Miami-Dade area (renowned for services to democracy) received a single complaint that Amanda Gorman’s
May 24, 2023, 8:47am Japan’s son and now the toast of an Infanta of Spain: Haruki Murakami has won the Princess of Asturias Award for literature, an award given by the Spanish royal foundation to significant works from anywhere in the world. The panel said Murakami’s work—novels ranging from 1987’s Norwegian Wood to last year’s
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Born in the USA’ is rock music’s ‘The Road Not Taken’: perhaps of all American songs, none has been more consistently misinterpreted than the title track from Bruce Springsteen’s bestselling 1984 album. And when we say ‘misinterpreted’, we don’t just mean people have missed the point slightly: they get
May 23, 2023, 12:51pm Alfred A. Knopf will publish Until August, the final (as far as we know) novel written by Nobel Prize–winning writer Gabriel García Márquez before his death in 2014, next year. After years of rumors that there was an “an entire literary masterpiece, never seen by the public” locked away, Arc of
It was while I was writing a novel about an anthropologist in a northern archipelago that I conceived of this book. The anthropologist was doing a village study: an analysis of the alignments and organization of a small, self-contained place. The novel was based on my own experiences of living in the Faroe Islands with