Literature

Over the holidays, while traveling out of state to visit family, I left my outsize houseplant collection in the hands of our pet sitter, a wildly talented cat whisperer but a less-than-expert caretaker of calathea. I feared the worst: that I would return to a home full of ex-flora, the floor covered in brown leaves,

January 11, 2024, 3:14pm More than 500 global writers, artists, filmmakers, and cultural workers (including Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux and Palestinian poet and activist Mohammed el-Kurd) are boycotting German state-funded associations in response to what El-Kurd has called Germany’s “McCarthyist policies that suppress freedom of expression, specifically expressions of solidarity with Palestine.” Called Strike Germany,

By any measure, Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez ran a remarkable 2018 race that was tailored to her district and benefited from shrewd organizing and even technological innovation. Running as a Democratic Socialist, she drew a large, multiracial progressive coalition that overwhelmed an incumbent, in Joseph Crowley, who personified the Wall-Street-friendly Democrat uninterested in local concerns but assumed

Novelist Lauren Groff joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss the new independent bookstore she and her husband are planning in Gainesville, Florida. The Lynx, which Groff aims to open this spring, will feature banned books, an act of resistance in a state where more than half of school districts have seen book

TODAY: In 1903, South African author of Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Stewart Paton is born.  How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rose up and won an underdog political victory. | Lit Hub Politics Lauren Groff talks about what it’s like to open a bookstore in Florida right now. | Lit Hub Selfishly curated experiences: İnci Atrek on

January 9, 2024, 10:00am Literary Hub is pleased to announce the 2024 class of Periplus Fellows. This year, Periplus awarded a total of 48 mentorships to writers of color living and working in the United States—selected from a pool of more than 500 applicants—pairing each one with a member of the collective, an established writer

I was given at birth one of the greatest gifts a writer could ask for: Being born into a family in which no one reads for pleasure. I’m exaggerating a bit. There was one book that was passed from family member to family member and that everyone—aunts, grandmother, both my parents—eventually read. Naturally, that was

I was given at birth one of the greatest gifts a writer could ask for: Being born into a family in which no one reads for pleasure. I’m exaggerating a bit. There was one book that was passed from family member to family member and that everyone—aunts, grandmother, both my parents—eventually read. Naturally, that was

January 8, 2024, 11:36am It’s easy to ridicule Florida for all its feverish urges to ban sexy books, but America’s latest obsession with censorship has truly gone nationwide. Towards the end of last year, in deeply blue, liberal Massachusetts (at W.E.B. DuBois Middle School no less!) Great Barrington police responded to a complaint about the

There have been countless books, poems and songs written about loneliness, paintings painted and sculptures sculpted. There have been entire symphonies and operas created in an attempt to convey and understand this most basic, agonizing human condition. And it’s never enough. Just like love, loneliness is a fundamental ingredient in what makes us human, what

My longtime girlfriend is a longtime bookseller. Her relationship with bookselling predates ours three times over. It is a surprisingly taxing career path—one that asks of the body, and of the mind. There are the bad days, where she brings home the classic bookseller gripes: failed hand-sells, disappearing stock lost to The System, rude customers,

The following is from Katherine Min’s posthumous novel, The Fetishist. Min‘s short stories appeared in Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The Three-penny Review, Glimmer Train, and others; she received an NEA grant, a Pushcart Prize, a Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, two New Hampshire State Council on the Arts Fellowships and a North Carolina Arts Council

TODAY: In 1956, Elizabeth Strout is born. (Photo by Larry D. Moore.) Whatever else it may hold, 2024 is going to be a great year for books. Here are 230 we’re particularly excited about, plus 24 sci-fi and fantasy titles to watch out for and the poetry books we want to read in the new year.

TODAY: In 1938, Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is born.    • “Bookselling is a polar, problematic lover, an insistent poly-amant.” What booksellers can teach us about reading, writing, and publishing. | Lit Hub • What happens when a fire destroys all your paintings? You become a writer, of course. | Lit Hub • Mike

January 5, 2024, 8:53am Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza has devastated all aspects of life in the region. The starving, traumatized survivors of relentless Israeli airstrikes spend their days digging through rubble with their bare hands. Health care workers and journalists are targeted by drone strikes and picked off by IDF snipers with chilling impunity. The

January 4, 2024, 10:32am Another year has come and gone, full of best books—and also bestsellers. As it turns out, just 23 percent of the bestselling books of 2023 were actually published in 2023—which is only a slightly smaller share than last year. Backlist books typically dominate the overall bestseller list, thanks to sales of

January 4, 2024, 3:01pm Today, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation announced the recipients of the third annual Silvers-Dudley Prizes, which recognize “outstanding achievement in literary criticism, arts writing, and journalism.” The six winners will receive a total of $135,000—with individual prizes ranging from $15,000 to $30,000. The judges for the 2024 Silvers-Dudley Prizes were the

As Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy vie for the Republican presidential nomination, Indian American reporter and memoirist Prachi Gupta joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan put these politicians into historical perspective. She discusses how the myth of Indian American exceptionalism has been used to further white supremacy and suppress other minority groups, and also