Literature

Movies are loud. They are often written and written about in clamorous verbiage: they leer and loom, assault, pummel, and thunder. They are religion and sex strapped together into a rig of worshipful attention, all spectacle satiation and ritual subjugation. Before every contest, the screen starts at black. Our heart races. The device ignites. Let’s

Of all the great premises™ boasted by this year’s slate of movies, the wonderful American Fiction has one of the very best. The film is about a veteran writer of literary fiction who, as a Black man, finds himself undesirable in the literary market for his lack of conforming to type. The (white-controlled) conglomerate that

December 15, 2023, 11:00am Today, the National Book Critics Circle announced the longlist for the Barrios Book in Translation Prize. The prize, now in its second year, “celebrates the artistic merit of literature in translation in any genre and seeks to recognize the valuable work of translators in expanding and enriching American literary culture by

TODAY: In 1901, 35-year-old writer and illustrator Beatrix Potter prints 250 copies of her first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, after getting fed up with receiving rejection letters from publishers.    “It’s the thought that counts, we say of gifts, and with books, well, there’s a whole lot of thought—six hours? twelve?—required to truly

December 15, 2023, 11:28am On Wednesday, German newspaper Die Zeit broke the news that the ceremony to award the prestigious Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought to Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen would be postponed (though not cancelled entirely) because one of the award’s main sponsors (the Green party-affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation), as well as the city of Bremen, had

And yet again, we’ve reached the end of a long, bad year. As is now our custom, for the sake of posterity, and probably because we’re masochists, starting today, we’ll be counting down the 50 biggest literary stories of 2023, so you can remember the good, the bad, and all the literary cool girls we met

Though she wrote it before the pandemic, Katherine May’s Wintering is very much about the way that a season—a literal or figurative winter—often requires from us a kind of intensified awareness of our connection to the elements in the world around us as time passes. Wintering requires care of ourselves, of the world around us,

TODAY: In 1847, Emily Brontë‘s Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey are published in a three-volume set under the pen names of Ellis and Acton Bell respectively in London by T. C. Newby.    To the members of the literary community we lost this year, we say a last thank you, and goodbye. |

December 13, 2023, 2:59pm The German Green Party-affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation, “in agreement with the Bremen Senate,” is withdrawing from awarding the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought to the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, citing Gessen’s recent New Yorker essay “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” as the reason for the decision. In the essay, published

TODAY: In 1960, English suffragette and literary journal editor Dora Marsden dies. This image captures Marsden’s the arrest for disrupting a meeting at Manchester University in 1909.     Also on Lit Hub: On the creative collaboration of Man Ray and Kiki de Montparnasse • Phyllis Rose on writing about real people, making your diaries public, and

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Alex Johnson’s new compendium of ‘on this day’ literary nuggets I began this blog eleven years ago to this day, back on 1 December 2012. Since then, I have broadened my range from curious facts about literary genres and specific authors to more

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Of all the authors whose works most follow Kafka, Ferenc Karinthy is unlikely to be a name to leap to most readers’ lips. He remains virtually unknown in English-speaking countries. And yet his 1970 novel Metropole is a quintessential Kafkaesque piece which also, at times, manages to take Kafka’s

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was an important twentieth-century writer whose work often explored some of the ‘biggest’ and most important ideas of his day. The following pick of his best books include a work documenting his experiences of drug-taking, classic dystopian fiction, radical utopian vision, and social satires of the

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys a new study of the unexpected worlds of C. S. Lewis December has always been the month read C. S. Lewis. Perhaps it was growing up reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the land of Narnia being in the grip

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Barbie Doll’ is a poem by the American writer and activist Marge Piercy (born 1936). It was published in 1971 before being included in Piercy’s 1973 collection, To Be of Use. The poem is an example of feminist literature: it focuses on a girl who is encouraged to perform

December 12, 2023, 10:36am A Roosevelt Island couple has proudly checked out five children’s books about the Palestinian experience, vowing not to return them so as to protect the good people of New York from blatant “indoctrination.” According the NY Post: The books — for children as young as 3 — were prominently on display

TODAY: In 1889, Victorian poet and playwright Robert Browning dies.     “Each of these portraits is, as advertised and expected, profoundly ‘humane.’” Gideon Lewis-Kraus recommends Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. | Lit Hub Criticism The 138 best book covers of 2023, as chosen by some of the industry’s best book cover

December 11, 2023, 12:52pm As you probably know, Literary Hub is produced by a small staff; most of us are writers, and/or moonlight as editors on other projects. This year, four of our number—that would be 36% percent of full time Literary Hub staffers, not too shabby—published books, which is certainly worthy of celebration. (Unfortunately, all