Literature

‘Women’ is a 1970 poem by Alice Walker (born 1944), one of the best-known African American writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Although she is probably most famous for her 1982 novel The Color Purple, Walker has written short stories and numerous other novels. She also started out her published career as

The following is from Dizz Tate’s Brutes. Tate grew up in Florida and lives in London, U.K. She has had short stories published in The Stinging Fly, Dazed, No Tokens Journal, Five Dials, 3:AM Magazine, among other publications. She was long-listed for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2020 and won the Bristol

‘A White Heron’ is one of the best-known short stories by the American writer Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909). Published in 1886 in the collection A White Heron and Other Stories, the story is about a young girl who is approached by a hunter who offers her money if she will divulge the location of a

February 8, 2023, 12:35pm The Academy Awards approach. And so, as we’ve done in the past, we have been preparing for the Fake Oscars by thinking about the Real Oscars: that’s right, the Book Oscars. Er, the Book Oscars that aren’t the National Book Awards. You can wear a gown to the National Book Awards.

‘Reunion’ is a 1962 short story by the American writer John Cheever (1912-82). In the story, a young man meets up for a reunion with his father, but his father’s rude manner leads to their reunion being a failure. ‘Reunion’, like much of John Cheever’s short fiction, seems straightforward and can easily be comprehended, but

The following is from Jennifer Savran Kelly’s debut novel Endpapers. Kelly lives in Ithaca, New York, where she writes, binds books, and works as a production editor at Cornell University Press. Her short fiction has appeared in Hobart, Black Warrior Review, Green Mountains Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts,

What are the best examples of the cinquain in English and American poetry? There is actually more than one way to define what a cinquain actually is, but the broadest definition is that a cinquain is any five-line poem. That’s it: a poem composed of five lines. But such a broad definition would mean that

February 7, 2023, 1:21pm Here’s a cool one. Dame Helen Mirren—the Oscar-winning star of The Queen, Gosford Park, Hitchcock, and, most recently, something called Shazam! Fury of the Gods—is set to star as the poet of apprehension herself, Patricia Highsmith, in an upcoming thriller film. Directed by Anton Corbijn (Control, A Most Wanted Man, many

Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare’s most perennially popular and widely studied plays. Its story of ‘star-cross’d lovers’, whose love for each other is doomed from the start because they belong to rival families in the Italian city of Verona, is one of the most famous love stories in world literature. Below, we introduce

The following is from Kevin Jared Hosein’s Hungry Ghosts. Hosein is the winner of the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the author of three books that have been published in the Caribbean, including The Repenters, which was short-listed for the Bocas Prize and long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. He is a science

‘Thank You, Ma’am’ is a 1958 short story by the African-American poet, novelist, and short-story writer Langston Hughes (1901-67). In the story, a teenage boy attempts to steal a woman’s purse, but she catches him and takes him back to her home, showing him some kindness and attempting to teach him right from wrong. You

February 6, 2023, 12:02pm Down your blacksmith tools and shake the moths out of your wedding dress, because Olivia Colman (The Favorite, The Father) and Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders, Spencer) are bringing Big Dickens Energy back to our TV screens. Great Expectations—an upcoming BBC/FX period drama miniseries based on Charles Dickens’ 1861 bildungsroman in which a

‘Those Winter Sundays’ is a 1962 poem by the American poet and essayist Robert Hayden (1913-80). It is probably his most widely anthologised and frequently studied poem, and arose from Hayden’s own conflicted feelings towards his foster father. You can read ‘Those Winter Sundays’ here (the poem takes around one minute to read) before reading

“I’ve never consciously strategized about how to make a sentence, let alone a poem. But I can see, even in the earliest poems, that my way of making a sentence involves enacting the push and pull of my interior life, a way of approaching a statement while also making room for its opposite.” In the

‘The Most Dangerous Game’ is a classic adventure story, first published in 1924. It is now the story for which its author, Richard Connell (1893-1949), is best-remembered, and critics and reviewers have drawn comparisons between ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ and Suzanne Collins’s bestselling Hunger Games series, because both narratives are about people hunting, and being

Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda was born in 1937 and was also raised to believe that weight management was a paramount concern for a young woman. As a teenager, she and her boarding school friends sent away for tapeworms and stuck their fingers down their throats after dinner to stay slim. As Fonda followed in her

‘Shooting an Elephant’ is a curious work in George Orwell’s canon. It is often reprinted with his essays, but in some ways Orwell’s account of his time working as a policeman in Burma can be regarded as closer to a short story than a factual essay. Indeed, doubt has been cast over whether the events

Every month, all the major streaming services add a host of newly acquired (or just plain new) shows, movies, and documentaries into their ever-rotating libraries. So what’s a dedicated reader to watch? Well, whatever you want, of course, but the name of this website is Literary Hub, so we sort of have an angle. To