Literature

Shel Silverstein (1930-99) was a popular American poet, cartoonist, musician, singer-songwriter, and man of many artistic talents. His most enduring poems are those which he wrote for younger readers. Given how popular his poems for children became, the story of how he came to write children’s poetry is somewhat surprising. Indeed, he hadn’t ever given

TODAY: In 1938, Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town opens on Broadway. (Pictured are Frank Craven, Martha Scott, and John Craven in the original production.)  “Why I’m still on strike.” Olivia McGiff’s portraits from the HarperCollins picket line. | Lit Hub “Writers are read for how they write, not what they write about.” Henry Louis Gates Jr. on

TODAY: In 1899, Chinese novelist and dramatist Lao She is born.    From Dear Edward to Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, here’s the Literary Film and TV You Need to Stream in February. | Lit Hub Film & TV How Jane Fonda somehow combined dance aerobics and progressive politics. | Lit Hub Sports and… Politics?

‘A Rose for Emily’ is one of the most widely studied American short stories of the twentieth century, but the subtle narrative style and William Faulkner’s use of symbolism are often difficult to interpret. Starting with the ‘rose’ in the story’s title, the text is rich with symbols whose significance can only be determined through

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