January 4, 2021, 12:07pm It’s only four days into 2021 and the Internet has united around its hatred of a guy named “Bean Dad.” If you feel your brain being battered and smoothed by the tide of social media (like me) and are thinking of doing a New Year’s detox (unlike me), let George Saunders
Literature
Every Monday through Friday, AudioFile’s editors recommend the best in audiobook listening. We keep our daily episodes short and sweet, with audiobook clips to give you a sample of our featured listens. What would happen if Jesus’s second coming occurred in America, and he believed the best way to initiate a religious rebirth was with
The following is excepted from Robert Jones, Jr.’s debut novel, The Prophets, about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation. Jones has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Essence, and OkayAfrica, among others. He is the creator of the social justice social media community Son of
The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically disrupting not only our daily lives but society itself. This show features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the deeper economic, political, and technological consequences of the pandemic. It’s our new daily podcast trying to make longterm sense out of the chaos of today’s global
I can’t attend, for the road between my poem and Damascus is cut off for postmodern reasons.–“I Can’t Attend,” by Ghayath Almadhoun* No ISBN sequence can keep track the world’s recent homeless, but the books won’t stop coming. As the refugee crisis grows unremittingly, with people out of Syria, El Salvador, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Bosnia… as
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the obscure and mysterious history of a now ubiquitous word If you’re sitting comfortably, how about a quick round of the Interesting Literature Friday Night Quiz of Doom? Well, all right, just a single quiz question. Ready? Where did the word ‘posh’ come
Every Monday through Friday, AudioFile’s editors recommend the best in audiobook listening. We keep our daily episodes short and sweet, with audiobook clips to give you a sample of our featured listens. Author and narrator Becky Cooper’s true-crime audiobook, We Keep the Dead Close, chronicles her meticulous and deeply personal investigation of a fifty-year-old murder case.
How To Proceed is a bi-monthly conversation about writing, creativity and the world we live in. Author Linn Ullmann talks to some of the world’s most exciting literary voices about their books, their writing process, and how they view the world and current events around them. Our guest in this episode is the German writer
In this week’s episode of Fiction/Non/Fiction, co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan are joined by novelist and essayist Claire Messud and journalist Brendan O’Meara. First, Messud discusses her new book of essays, Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, and the difficulties of grasping the facts when we’re bombarded with so much
The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically disrupting not only our daily lives but society itself. This show features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the deeper economic, political, and technological consequences of the pandemic. It’s our new daily podcast trying to make longterm sense out of the chaos of today’s global
The story of Icarus is one of the most famous tales from Greek myth. The tale is often interpreted as being fundamentally about the dangers of hubris, with Icarus’ flight a metaphor for man’s overreaching of his limits (and coming to a sticky end as a result). But does the story really mean that? In
John Rember, A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World (University of New Mexico Press) Jeremy Garber, Powell’s, Portland: John Rember’s A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World collects ten essays about civilization’s ongoing (and ever accelerating) anthropocentric woes: climate change, overpopulation, fossil fuel dependence, the Sixth Extinction, consumerism, capitalism,
Welcome to Lit Century: 100 Years, 100 Books. Combining literary analysis with an in-depth look at historical context, hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols choose one book for each year of the 20th century, and—along with special guests—will take a deep dive into a hundred years of literature. Isaac Butler joins hosts Sandra Newman and
Everyone else has published their year-end lists of The Best, Our Favorites, Top 10, and so forth (that includes me individually and Lit Hub editorially, too). Why shouldn’t we gather the Best from 2020’s Books You May Have Missed? Choosing from the fifty-odd titles means that these ten are really the cream of a much
Emergence Magazine is a quarterly online publication exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Each issue explores a theme through innovative digital media, as well as
‘When Shall We Three Meet Again’ is the opening line of William Shakespeare’s great tragedy, Macbeth. Spoken by the First Witch, the line immediately ushers us into a world of witches, prophecy, and black magic, elements which Shakespeare probably chose to include because the new King of England, James I, had written censoriously about witchcraft
Hosted by Paul Holdengräber, The Quarantine Tapes chronicles shifting paradigms in the age of social distancing. Each day, Paul calls a guest for a brief discussion about how they are experiencing the global pandemic. Guest host Eddie Glaude is joined by writer Kiese Laymon on Episode 146 of The Quarantine Tapes. They connect over their
Bookable features established authors and emerging talent in conversation with host and author Amanda Stern, perhaps best known for creating the Happy Ending Music & Reading Series at New York’s famous Joe’s Pub and Symphony Space. With an immersive sound experience designed around each episode, Bookable takes you on an audio exploration of a book—usually