Literature

Sylvia Plath is the sort of writer for whom the idiom, “I’d read her grocery lists” was conceived. On this point, however, she has an edge: You can, indeed, read her grocery lists. Plath’s journals, published posthumously, are filled with granular detail: Amidst dramatic entries on feminist doctrines and suicidal ideation, she penned shopping lists,

‘I Have a Dream’ is one of the greatest speeches in American history. Delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-68) in Washington D.C. in 1963, the speech is a powerful rallying cry for racial equality and for a fairer and equal world in which African Americans will be as free as white Americans. If you’ve

October 26, 2022, 9:30am Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Michael Chang’s Synthetic Jungle: Poems, their latest poetry collection forthcoming from Curbstone Books. Chang’s poetry has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. In 2021, they were awarded the Poetry Project’s prestigious Brannan Prize.  Synthetic

1.Perch at the circulation desk, smiling like a happy librarian even though you haven’t had a lunch break. Tap out an interlibrary loan request into a system optimistically called WorldShare. Sneak bites of sticky edamame pasta and Impossible sausage, regretting a flirtation with veganism. 2.Marvel at the sight of forty-five teenagers bent over books, utterly

October 25, 2022, 1:20pm Today I learned that not only is there a real Frankenstein Castle (in Mühltal, Germany), but that is was the birthplace of a 17th century alchemist named Johann Konrad Dipple, who was obsessed with finding the secret to immortality and was, among other things, rumored to perform macabre experiments on bodies

Featured image from Sophie Calle’s The Hotel. The Siglio origin story famously begins with founder Lisa Pearson in Prague in the days before with Velvet Revolution being slipped a samizdat copy of exiled novelist Milan Kundera’s incendiary novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Which is to say, in commission of a crime. Because anyone found

‘The Last Night of the World’ is a short story by the American writer Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), published in Esquire magazine in February 1951 before being reprinted in his 1952 collection The Illustrated Man. In this story of just a few pages, a husband tells his wife that the world will end later that night.

October 24, 2022, 3:01pm Khadija Abdalla Bajabar’s The House of Rust has won the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust and Graywolf Press announced on Friday. The prize comes with an award of $25,000 for the author. The judging committee noted that two other books were finalists: How

My first ideal of motherhood, before Bringing Up Bébé or the phrase “attachment parenting” or the ascription of maternal devotion to months of breastfeeding completed, came from the framed print of Mary Cassatt’s Mother and Child on a Green Background hanging in my childhood bedroom. I’d chosen the print from the Musee D’Orsay when my

October 21, 2022, 9:30am Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Luis Alberto Urrea’s Good Night, Irene, the latest novel from the bestselling novelist and Pulitzer Prize and NBCC finalist, which will be published by Little, Brown, this spring. Here’s how the publisher describes the novel: In 1943, Irene Woodward abandons an abusive

October 21, 2022, 10:35am In 1789 Paris, a certain M. Etteilla (a pseudonym of the French occultist Jean-Baptiste Alliette) applied for a patent to print Livre de Thot. Not that kind of thot, mind you—it refers to the Egyptian god Thoth, though I also see it defined generally as “symbol of divine intelligence, incarnates thought,

TODAY: In 1935, American crime writer Ann Rule is born.   Unsurprisingly, George Saunders is kind of a chaotic reader. | Lit Hub Read Émile Zola’s, T.S. Eliot’s, and George Orwell’s thoughts on cheese in Noëlle Janaczewska’s culinary and artistic history. | Lit Hub Food Renee Alsarraf, a veterinary oncologist with metastatic cancer, reflects on facing her own mortality alongside

October 21, 2022, 1:22pm Some good news to ring in the weekend: fans of George Orwell (and fans in the making) will soon be able to enjoy a serialization of his works, courtesy of Orwell Daily, a project to bring his writing to new audiences. Orwell Daily will be a new, daily newsletter, giving readers

‘Self-Reliance’ is an influential 1841 essay by the American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). In this essay, Emerson argues that we should get to know our true selves rather than looking to other people to fashion our individual thoughts and ideas for us. Among other things, Emerson’s essay is a powerful rallying cry

October 21, 2022, 1:47pm If the New York Times Best-Seller List were a Monopoly game, Colleen Hoover would have hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place and you’d definitely be paying her every time you hopped on a railroad. Please forgive the tortured metaphor, but there are only so many ways to say that this woman is

October 20, 2022, 10:20am Liz Truss has resigned as Prime Minister of the UK, making her 44-day tenure the shortest in the country’s history. This non-shocking announcement comes on the same day the co-author of a forthcoming biography of Truss tweeted about his book’s pub date: 🚨 Delighted to say ‘Out of the Blue: The

October 20, 2022, 1:13pm As someone who has more than once lost significant chunks of writing projects because of my long-standing allergy to backing up my work, I have great empathy for Lana Del Rey, who announced on her Instagram Stories that someone had broken into her car and stolen a backpack containing a computer,

October 19, 2022, 11:15am Rick Riordan will be publishing a new Percy Jackson book—the first in 14 years—next September. I only hope that my now-11-year-old won’t be too cool by then for Riordan’s entertainingly contemporary take on Greek mythology (he currently loves everything Riordan’s ever written). The book, called The Chalice of the Gods, is