Literature

The following is from Bridget Pitt’s Eye Brother Horn. Pitt is a South African author and environmental activist who has published poetry, short fiction, non-fiction and three novels (Unbroken Wing, The Unseen Leopard, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize and the Wole Soyinka African Literature Award, and Notes from the Lost Property Department).

TODAY: In 1993, Maya Angelou recites her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration.    Ethan Warren considers love, war, and the ethos of James Herriot in the PBS series All Creatures Great and Small. | Lit Hub Film & TV Jared Yates Sexton reflects on growing up with conspiracy theories

Previously, we selected ten poems about fire, but what about fire’s elemental opposite? What are the best poems about ice and icy things, whether the poem deals in literal ice and icy landscapes, or in ice as a metaphor for extreme coldness of some kind? Below, we select and introduce ten of the greatest icy

TODAY: In 1941, feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter is born.    In guns we trust: Paul Auster asks why America is the most violent country in the Western world. | Lit Hub Politics     Why Janet Malcom, after years of aversion to writing about herself, finally did: “She knew better than most that the only thing scarier than

January 20, 2023, 11:01am It’s not hugely surprising, given their songwriting styles, but everyone’s favorite millennial supergroup—Boygenius, aka Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker—is really into reading. According to this Rolling Stone cover profile, the first bonding moment between Dacus and Baker was…  …when they played a show together in Washington, D.C. “I came

‘Mother Tongue’ is an essay by Amy Tan, an American author who was born to Chinese immigrants in 1952. Tan wrote ‘Mother Tongue’ in 1990, a year after her novel The Joy Luck Club was a runaway success. In the essay, Tan discusses her relationship with language, and how her mother’s influence has shaped her

January 20, 2023, 11:08am Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Shannon Sanders’ debut story collection, Company, which Graywolf Press calls “a richly detailed, brilliantly woven collection about the lives and lore of one Black family.” Here’s some more from the publisher about the book, which will be released on October 3: Shannon Sanders’s

January 19, 2023, 1:04pm You’ve known and loved her as Donna Meagle in Parks and Rec and Ruby Hill in Good Girls, and now Retta is set to play a crime-solving Bookstagrammer in NBC’s forthcoming Murder by the Book. This series (brought to us by Good Girls creator Jenna Bans) is about an Instagram-famous book reviewer putting her

‘A Poison Tree’ is one of the poems from William Blake’s 1794 volume Songs of Experience, the companion-volume to his earlier Songs of Innocence. This poem – one of his most popular and widely studied – is about the ways in which anger eats away at us when it is ignored and not addressed, with

January 19, 2023, 10:43am Huge if true: Stanford economics professor Erik Brynjolfsson does not think ChatGPT is coming for our extremely lucrative writing careers. Instead, he predicts that the AI technology will function as a “calculator for writing,” cutting down on the “routine, rote type of work” of writing. As to what writing functions are

January 18, 2023, 9:05am Rumor has it that bestselling memoirist and plain ol’ bloke Prince Harry actually signed a four-book deal—so get ready for three more world-historically intense publicity cycles! As Tom Tivnan, managing editor of The Bookseller, told the Mirror UK: I believe Harry does have a four-book deal, but it is shrouded in

Anne Bradstreet (1612-72) holds a special place in American literature, and has a notable claim to fame. Her life as one of the first immigrants to the New World in the 1630s helped to inform the poetry she wrote, which often deals with everyday themes: family life, her marriage and her children, and the various

January 18, 2023, 10:00am Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Nishanth Injam’s debut short story collection, The Best Possible Experience, which Pantheon calls an “astonishingly assured debut from an award-winning writer, an emotionally rich portrait of contemporary India and its diaspora and a yearning rendering of the people and places we call home.”

January 17, 2023, 4:56am Featuring new books by Tsitsi Dangarembga, De’Shawn Charles Winslow, and Monica Heisey, as well as Bret Easton Ellis and Anne Waldman (big week for Bennington alums!). Happy browsing! * Bret Easton Ellis, The Shards(Knopf) “Sometimes horrifying, sometimes nostalgic and even poignant, Ellis’s latest is an unqualified success.”–Booklist Marisa Crane, I Keep

‘Phenomenal Woman’ is a 1994 poem by the American poet Maya Angelou (1928-2014). Angelou was a singer, dancer, composer, actor, teacher, memoirist, and poet: a woman of many talents. She was also a key voice in the American civil rights movement. Much of her work is about striving to succeed, even in the face of

January 17, 2023, 11:00am Other than working with writers to publish great books, the thing I was most looking forward to in creating Roxane Gay Books, was covers. For the first two titles, I commissioned Rodrigo Corral who has such a unique and bold vision for the book covers he designs. His work is regularly

It was 1963, and Karen Stamm was unmarried, pregnant, eighteen years old, and eager for an abortion. A bright woman from a lower-middle-class family, she was finishing her education and in no way interested in having a child. Her home state of New York had treated abortion as a crime since the early nineteenth century.

‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ is a 1973 short story by the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018). A powerful tale which its author described as a ‘psychomyth’, this story explores some weighty and important themes over the course of its eight pages. Below, we explore some of the most prominent themes