Literature

February 3, 2023, 10:34am Yup. The recent star of the absolutely charming series Sex Education is collecting the sexual fantasies of women as part of her plan to reprise Nancy Friday’s 1973 book, The Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies. Friday’s book, which was groundbreaking at the time, collected (anonymously) the deepest, darkest sexual desires of

‘The Lottery’ by the American writer Shirley Jackson (1916-65) was first published on 26 June 1948 in the New Yorker magazine. The story was initially met with anger and even a fair amount of hate mail from readers, with many cancelling their subscriptions to the magazine. What was it within this dark and terrifying story

February 2, 2023, 11:04am All hail the paperback release. * Tessa Hadley, Free Love(Harper Perennial, February 7) The HarperCollins Union has been on strike since November 10, 2022. Literary Hub stands in solidarity with the union. Please consider donating to the strike fund. “The stories of break and repair in this novel are wonderfully unpredictable.”–Minneapolis Star

‘A Rose for Emily’ by William Faulkner contains some memorable characters besides Emily herself. Even the narrator is a curious creation and deserving of further discussion, since Faulkner does some interesting things with narrative in his short story. Let’s take a closer look at the characters in ‘A Rose for Emily’, both great and small,

February 2, 2023, 1:50pm This morning, The Cut published its definitive guide to contemporary etiquette, from ghosting to tipping to navigating varying levels of COVID caution. The list contained plenty of fascinating and discourse-generating takeaways (though I haven’t yet seen anyone address the wild revelation that former Vogue editor Lauren Santo Domingo believes one should “Never ask

The American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s – and beyond – was a political movement which often used art to help change popular opinion. Poets associated with civil rights often used their poetry to commemorate those figureheads who campaigned, fought, and sometimes died to bring about social change; they also used their

February 1, 2023, 3:03pm As you can see in the trailer below, the long-destined adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s 2016 novel, The Power (read an excerpt here) looks fantastic, not least because it stars the divine Toni Collette. I’m glad this one is a series (on Amazon Prime) and not a feature-length, as the nuances of

William Faulkner’s celebrated short story ‘A Rose for Emily’, which was initially published in Forum in 1930 before being reprinted in his short-story collection These Thirteen the following year, encompasses a great number of important and weighty themes within its dozen or so pages. But what are the most significant and prominent themes of ‘A

February 1, 2023, 1:49pm It started out as more than just a ride. In the early 1990s, Disneyland Paris (then called “Euro Disney”) had planned a whole Jules Verne area, “Discoveryland,” to be one of the main features of the new amusement park. According to researcher and documentarian Kevin Perjurer, the area’s centerpiece was going

‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ is a 1968 short story by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014). Like much of his fiction, this story is an example of magic realism (which we’ll say more about below). Subtitled ‘A Tale for Children’, ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ is about an elderly

January 30, 2023, 11:53am Today I learned that Channing Tatum is writing a “fun and sexy” romance novel with Roxane Gay. And you know what, that is fun and sexy! Yep—Tatum is expanding from children’s books (and this) into something a little more grown-up. “She has almost a roughed-out outline of a story that we

‘Where the Sidewalk Ends’ is probably the best-known poem by Shel Silverstein. A popular poem for children, it was first published in 1974. The poem describes a hidden other world which lies between the sidewalk and the street: a world which children know how to find, where things are somewhat different from our world. You

January 30, 2023, 1:44pm Yesterday, the American Library Association announced the winners of the 2023 Carnegie Medals for Excellence. In fiction, the winner was Julie Otsuka for her most recent novel, The Swimmers. This brilliant book starts out at a community pool; it invites us into the rhythms of its inhabitants, lulls us into their routines—and

Shelf Talkers is a series at Lit Hub where booksellers from independent bookstores around the country share their favorite reads of the moment. Here are recommendations from the staff at Left Bank Books in St. Louis, MO. * Adina Talve-Goodman, Your Hearts, Your Scars This spare, posthumous collection of gorgeous essays about life before and

‘Fish Cheeks’ is a short autobiographical narrative by the American writer Amy Tan (born 1952). Tan is probably best-known for The Joy Luck Club, her 1989 novel containing a series of interwoven short stories told by a number of Chinese-American women who are members of the titular club; but ‘Fish Cheeks’ was published two years

TODAY: In 1940, Isaac Babel is executed by the NKVD.   Also on Lit Hub: What the booksellers are reading at Left Bank Books • Peter Turchi on the power of the literary aside • Read from (and listen to) Aleksandar Hemon’s latest novel, The World and All That It Holds

January 27, 2023, 10:09am Lovers of gorgeous prose and ghost-soaked literary fiction rejoice: two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward’s next novel officially has a release date. Let Us Descend, Ward’s first novel in five years (since 2017’s Sing, Unburied Sing) will be published by Scribner on October 3. The publisher has described the novel as

‘We Wear the Mask’ is a poem by the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), written in 1895 and included in Dunbar’s 1896 collection Majors and Minors. In the poem, Dunbar writes about the fact that many members of a marginalised community (which can be tacitly understood to mean the Black community in this context)