Literature

Good book criticism is booming right now. I have at least some degree of confidence in saying this because for the past six years, I’ve been keeping track of my favorite reviews to prepare for these annual roundups, and my 2023 longlist was by far the biggest and most difficult to narrow down. We’ve lost

The 1970s closed with one of comedy’s great controversies. Monty Python’s Life of Brian was an outrageous parody of biblical times. Its wild sight gags, absurd humor, convincing set design, and social commentary delighted Monty Python fans. However, politicians connected to the evangelical movement suggested that the members of Monty Python—John Cleese, Eric Idle, Graham

Let’s imagine, for the purpose of this essay, that the following statement is true: An AI writes a novel. Actually, forget about the imagining. This is already happening. Today’s AIs—large language models (LLMs) specifically, like GPT-4—can write. If you’ve glanced at the headlines this year, you probably know this. They can write papers for high

The first thing you notice about Laurie Anderson is her voice. Straight-forward and matter-of-fact, folksy and familiar, it is the voice of Middle America, earnestly asking what is happening to America. Like many people, I first encountered Anderson’s voice in the song “O Superman.” Recorded in 1981, it features haunting snippets of plain-spoken electro poetry

TODAY: In 1892, George Bernard Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses premieres at the Royalty Theatre in London. It is not well received.   A magnificent relic: Samantha Harvey muses on the slow death of the International Space Station. | Lit Hub Space! Why there’s more to eyeliner than meets the eye. | Lit Hub History From mass incarceration to mass

It’s December 8th, which means you can officially watch the film adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 apocalyptic novel, Leave the World Behind, on Netflix! Directed by Sam Esmail, the simmering thriller stars Ethan Hawke, Julia Roberts, and Mahershala Ali—and you’ll even catch Rumaan and his family in a scene. To celebrate the premiere, we asked

The following is from E.J. Koh’s The Liberators. Koh is the author of The Magical Language of Others and the poetry collection A Lesser Love. Koh’s work has appeared in AGNI, the Atlantic, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Slate, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA at Columbia University and

The points are tallied, the math is done, and the results are in. Yes, all year long the diligent and endearingly disgruntled Book Marks elves have been mining reviews from every corner of the literary internet. Brows furrowed, stomachs growling, they’ve worked from break of dawn to blink of dusk, seven days a week, scouring

From essays to interviews, excerpts to blog posts, reading lists to poems, we publish around 350 pieces a month at Lit Hub. And while we are proud of all of the 4,000+ pieces we’ve shared in 2022, we do have our personal favorites. Below are a few of the Lit Hub features the staff loved

December 7, 2023, 2:00pm I’m very happy to announce that, starting in January 2024, Lit Hub will feature two new columnists, Kristen Arnett and Maris Kreizman. Anyone familiar with Lit Hub (and the literary internet, for that matter) will know the work of Kristen Arnett, the librarian-turned-novelist who, once upon a time, was why Twitter

December 7, 2023, 3:15pm A sobering new report, released yesterday by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, details the devastating impact two months of Israeli bombardment have had on the cultural sector of Gaza. Titled “Second Preliminary Report on Cultural Sector Damage,” the wide-ranging report begins with this powerful introduction from Minister of Culture Dr. Atef Abu Saif

December 7, 2023, 5:11pm The Palestinian poet, writer, literature professor, and activist Dr. Refaat Alareer was killed today in a targeted Israeli airstrike that also killed his brother, his sister, and her four children. Dr. Alareer was a beloved professor of world literature, comparative literature, Shakespeare, and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he

Write-minded: Weekly Inspiration for Writers is currently in its fourth year. We are a weekly podcast for writers craving a unique blend of inspiration and real talk about the ups and downs of the writing life. Hosted by Brooke Warner of She Writes and Grant Faulkner of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), each theme-focused episode

Narrator Dion Graham joins AudioFile’s Michele Cobb to discuss his narration of King: A Life, written by Jonathan Eig, and one of AudioFile’s 2023 Best Biography & Memoir Audiobooks. Listen to hear Graham discussing the research and preparations that went into this narration, and the challenges he faced bringing it to life. It’s a riveting

There was a lesson at school about the painting Las Meninas, when Shaun was fifteen. It was about how the painting disoriented its viewer and left them not knowing what it was they were looking at. It’s a painting inside a painting, his teacher had said – look closely. Look here. Velázquez, the artist, is

All photos courtesy of e-Kitabu. In 1993, I was a teenager, volunteering to work with street children in Kibera, the largest “slum” on the continent of Africa. I held babies, played hokey-pokey and Swahili versions of patty cake with grade-school kids, fielded requests for money by street children as we rode the matatus to downtown

When finishing a novel, there is an introspective sweet spot before publication and after the final edits get turned in, when, in a quiet anxious period, I’m forced to look at my creation, to try and understand what I have done, to remember how this thing was formed. An important question for any journey: what

Finally, we can say that if male aggressiveness and sporadic violent competition do seem to be general aspects of human nature, group violence, along with social inequality and subordination, are generally not—­at least not when we live in the social conditions under which we evolved as a species. Those conditions changed as the domestication of