Literature

‘Half and Half’ is one of the stories from Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club. Told by a Chinese American woman named Rose Hsu Jordan, ‘Half and Half’ incorporates two stories from the narrator’s life: the breakdown of her marriage to an American man named Ted, and an incident from her childhood when

October 14, 2022, 11:54am Craig Finn is the lead singer of a band called The Hold Steady and I have always loved his songwriting. Finn is something like a poet laureate of Midwestern malaise, extracting tragicomic pathos from a particular kind of exurban fuckery that speaks to my southern Ontario upbringing. So many of Finn’s

October 13, 2022, 12:59pm The T. S. Eliot Prize, the prestigious literary prize that honors new poetry collections in the UK, has announced its shortlist of 10 books. Judges Jean Sprackland, Hannah Lowe and Roger Robinson determined the shortlist from a record submission pool of 201 books; each of the poets on the shortlist will

October 13, 2022, 1:32pm L’Engle-lovin’ theater kids of the world, rejoice: a stage musical of A Wrinkle in Time, one of the most acclaimed and beloved children’s books of the 20th century, is in the works. The adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbury Award-winning 1962 novel about a girl who travels through space and time to rescue

October 12, 2022, 11:00am Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Jai Chakrabarti’s A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, forthcoming from Penguin Random House in February 2023. The book, comprised of 14 short stories, details what family means today across cultures, continents, and faith. The title story, set in Kolkata in the 1980s,

‘Village People’ is a short story by Bessie Head (1937-86), a South African writer who, though born in South Africa, is usually considered Botswana’s most influential writer, having moved there in 1964. The story is narrated by a young girl living in Botswana in the Kalahari Desert, where rain rarely falls and hunger and drought

October 12, 2022, 12:51pm John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has announced the 25 recipients of its 2022 fellowships (colloquially known as the “genius grant”), and as ever, the group represents a fascinating array of people at the tops of their diverse fields. This year’s group includes a jazz cellist and composer, an astrodynamicist,

You’re tuning into another dimension. A dimension of tweets and the writers who send them. You have just now entered the Twitterverse. Each week, Gabe Hudson welcomes one of his favorite writers and pulls four of their tweets. The guest reads one of those tweets out loud. Then Gabe and the guest use that tweet

October 11, 2022, 12:45pm The Paris Review has announced that Vivian Gornick will receive the 2023 Hadada Award, which recognizes lifetime achievement and is given to “a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” Mona Simpson, publisher of The Paris Review, praised Gornick in a statement

“My body is a lens / I can look through with my mind,” writes the poet Ama Codjoe in the opening pages of Bluest Nude, her debut collection. It is impossible, of course, to perceive one’s own body from outside it, but Codjoe’s speakers find approximations and resemblances all around them: in mirrors, in photographs,

‘Continuity of Parks’ is a 1956 short story by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar (1914-84). In the story, which is just two pages long, a man reads a novel in which two lovers, a man and a woman, plot the murder of the woman’s husband. At the end of the story, it turns out that,

Sometimes, when it rains gothic blood, it pours. Such is the situation we find ourselves in this October, as not one, not two, not three, but four new vampire dramas adapted from cult favorite books are airing on four different networks all at once. With so many vampires and so little time before Halloween and

The internet did not cause the insurrection. But it enabled it. The technology of any age in human history shapes the culture of that time. With the advent of agriculture and farming tools, humans developed stationary civilizations and abandoned thousands of years of itinerancy. The printing press made the written word accessible, heralding in the

TODAY: In 1849, Edgar Allen Poe dies in Baltimore, at ago 40, under mysterious circumstances.     “A woman is a useful symbol for the splay of land on which such a free man saunters.” Rachel Richardson on Thoreau, running, and the pleasures of not quite knowing where you’re going. | Lit Hub Memoir In praise

October 7, 2022, 9:30am In what marks a glorious return to filmmaking after a nearly 20-year absence, John Waters (Baltimore’s favorite son and American cinema’s favorite degenerate) will write and direct an adaptation of his 2022 debut novel, Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance. The adaptation, to be produced by Village Roadshow Pictures, will be Waters’ first time

TODAY: In 1892, Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva is born.  “Cheever drank. Roth womanized. My grandfather wrote quietly in his office for 60 years.” Alison Fairbrother on learning lessons—in writing and life—from her grandfather, E.L. Doctorow. | Lit Hub Memoir Stephen King pens an ode to Maine cuisine—plus, a recipe for Cujo-inspired French toast casserole. | Lit Hub Food Elizabeth

October 7, 2022, 10:30am If you tore through Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s 2019 novel Fleishman Is in Trouble with as much relish as I did (and based on critical and internet commenter response to the book, you did), chances are you’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of its FX adaptation. The series begins streaming on Hulu on November 17,

‘Sticks’ is a very short story by the contemporary American writer George Saunders (born 1958), who is perhaps best-known for his 2017 Booker-Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo. This piece of flash fiction, which was included in Saunders’ 2013 collection Tenth of December, sees a man recalling his father’s habit of decorating two sticks outside