Literature

August 28, 2020, 11:44am As both a social media editor and a sometimes-writer who is on Twitter, I feel uniquely qualified to say that writers shouldn’t be on Twitter. I know: everyone has to hustle. Twitter can be a “community.” Personally, though, I find that the more a writer tweets, the less interested I am

TODAY: In 1992,  Mary Norton, author of The Borrowers series, dies. “Animals aren’t just repositories for human meanings, even if we unthinkingly use them to reflect our own selves and concerns.” Helen Macdonald offers some hard-won wisdom for writing about the natural world. | Lit Hub Craft “You were a sweet and powerful man, walking through the fire of your time.”

August 28, 2020, 1:01pm Just a friendly reminder that tomorrow, August 29th, is Independent Bookstore Day. This year, the festivities will be both online and in-person at 600+ local bookstores around the country, starting tonight with a conversation between Mary Norris and Ann Goldstein about Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults. Sure, every day

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews an early example of ‘gritty’ epic fantasy It was the late, great Terry Pratchett who observed that most modern fantasy is just rearranging the furniture in Tolkien’s attic. And many innovations within the genre have tended to use the same tropes, character types,

August 28, 2020, 1:29pm Happy Independent Bookstore Day! As part of its guide to Black-owned bookshops in the US, O, The Oprah Magazine created an illustrated map of some of the highlights, and it’s really delightful. The team also asked writers like Tayari Jones, Kiley Reid, and Clint Smith where they like to shop; you can

August 27, 2020, 4:11pm For the first time in more than a century, Poetry magazine will cease printing for a month, the editors announced this week. The decision comes nearly two months after the poetry community rose up in protest against the magazine and the Poetry Foundation, with dozens of prize-winning poets announcing they would

August 27, 2020, 3:29pm With this year’s Independent Bookstore Day occurring at a particularly rough time for booksellers, the iconic Powell’s Books in Portland has decided to make a statement and stop selling through Amazon. In a statement, owner Emily Powell notes that the occasion, this year, feels “especially weighty,” prompting them to take action

August 26, 2020, 12:02pm The International Booker Prize is awarded annually to the best book written in any language, translated into English, and published in the UK or Ireland. It comes with a whopping £50,000—shared equally between the author and translator. This year, the judges read 124 books in 30 languages. In a touching tribute

Empires and imperialism have been popular themes for poets over the centuries. The tone has often been elegiac: the impermanence of empires, their inevitably decay, and the moral and political problems the very idea of colonialism and imperialism suggest, are all frequent themes of poems about empire. Here’s our pick of ten of the best.

August 26, 2020, 12:26pm The latest in the ongoing controversy at the National Book Critics Circle: after a “special meeting” on Monday, over 130 members of the NBCC met to vote on whether or not to remove Carlin Romano from its board. Romano, you’ll remember, is the board member and former NBCC president who criticized

August 25, 2020, 12:06pm A groundbreaking children’s book based on an equally groundbreaking sports hero comes out today: Fauja Singh Keeps Going by Simran Jeet Singh, featuring the story of the first centenarian marathon runner, is also the first children’s book from a major publisher that features a Sikh main character, according to its author.

August 25, 2020, 1:07pm With voter registration deadlines approaching and misinformation around voter fraud spreading, a newly-formed coalition of writers is volunteering their time to defeat Donald Trump in the presidential election this fall. The group, Writers Against Trump—whose initial members include Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Carolyn Forché, and Natasha Trethewey—is collecting testimonies from authors

August 24, 2020, 12:04pm Welcome to the Book Marks Questionnaire, where we ask authors questions about the books that have shaped them. This week, we spoke to The Revisioners author Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. * Book Marks: First book you remember loving? Margaret Wilkerson Sexton: Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. BM: Favorite re-read?

‘England in 1819’ is a sonnet by the second-generation English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). It’s one of Shelley’s most angry and politically direct poems, although a number of the allusions Shelley makes to contemporary events require some analysis and interpretation to be fully understood now, more than two centuries on. Before we offer

August 24, 2020, 2:01pm Virginia Woolf is famous, among other things, for declaring that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” But did you know that Woolf’s own room for writing fiction was a total mess? (I didn’t either, but it’s true.) In Leonard Woolf’s

August 21, 2020, 10:00am I didn’t. But it’s true: in 1945 or 1946, Ray Bradbury (who was born 100 years ago tomorrow), then known mostly in the pulp fiction market, submitted one of his short stories, “The Homecoming,” to Mademoiselle, a fashion magazine known for publishing high quality literary fiction. It was a long shot,

August 21, 2020, 10:04am Does anyone else remember the young adult series From the Files of Madison Finn? Surely I can’t be the only one who, as an awkward and bookish middle-schooler, devoured them. The series follows twelve-year-old Madison Finn. She lives in upstate New York. Her parents are divorced. Her favorite color is orange. She