Literature

September 9, 2022, 10:22am It was announced yesterday that Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri who will always be remembered for fleeing the very crowd he’d recently egged on with a fist, has written a book called Manhood.* The book, to be published by Regnery, purports to call on “American men to stand up and

TODAY: In 1886, Hilda Doolittle, a poet and leader of the Imagist movement who used H.D. as her pseudonym, is born.     Ann Beattie in praise of the great Chef James Haller, whose lessons in cooking apply just as seamlessly to life. | Lit Hub Food “It’s the kind of energy that just might change your

‘The Ice Palace’ is a short story by the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in May 1920. The story is about a southern belle who becomes engaged to a man from the North; however, she almost freezes to death in an ice palace at a winter carnival

September 9, 2022, 12:57pm If you’ve ever spent time in a Facebook parents’ group, you know that aside from the occasional good pediatrician recommendation, they are absolute nightmarish cesspools of sleep-training blowups and decidedly un-gentle Gentle Parenting evangelism. Apparently, though—as there always is with Facebook—there’s an even darker side to such groups (the conservative ones,

When I first started watching Nathan Fielder’s HBO series The Rehearsal, the first comparisons that came up in my bookish mind were novels like Tom McCarthy’s Remainder or Ashley Hutson’s One’s Company, which imagine protagonists who, after receiving millions of dollars, decide to spend all their money creating replicas of real-life situations or sets from

September 8, 2022, 1:00pm The Poetry Foundation today announced the winners of its annual Pegasus Awards, including a sweeping expansion of its Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the prestigious lifetime achievement award normally given to one living poet each year. This year, 11 poets received the prize in honor of the 110th anniversary of POETRY magazine: that’s a

TODAY: In 1924, Grace Metalious, best-known for her novel Peyton Place, is born.    Also on Lit Hub: Readings from contemporary Nigeria, recommended by Lola Jaye • A plea for practical commitment to our planet • Read from Hemley Boum’s newly translated novel, Days Come and Go (tr. Nchanji Njamnsi)

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) is widely recognised as one of the greatest – and most lyrical – science-fiction writers of the twentieth century, although he preferred to describe himself as a ‘fantasy writer’ or simply as a ‘writer’. Although he is known for novels such as the dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451 and the horror novel Something

September 7, 2022, 1:57pm I’ve noticed that poets on the internet typically inspire either rhapsodic Twitter-praise (often from other poets), or extreme annoyance. So it’s nice to see someone react to one in a slightly more concrete way (even if the poet in question died in 1916). Inspired by Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan poet who

TODAY: In 1887, English poet and critic Edith Sitwell is born. Novels you need to read this fall, according to us. | Lit Hub Reading Lists “Today, the island’s primary export is middle- and lower-income families who can no longer afford to live here.” Mary Bergman on the reality of Nantucket versus Elin Hilderbrand’s summer

September 6, 2022, 2:31pm Neil MacGregor, the chair of the judging panel for this year’s Booker Prize, announced its shortlist today. MacGregor said that in each of the six books on the shortlist, “the author has used language not just to tell us what happened, but to create a world, an imagined universe, that we

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode, Andrew is joined by A.M. Homes, author of The Unfolding. Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s

Although it was a last-minute addition, the myth of the Fisher King plays an important part in one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century: T. S. Eliot’s modernist poem The Waste Land (1922). But what is the story of the Fisher King, and what is its meaning and significance? Who was the Fisher

September 5, 2022, 8:28am The winners of the 2022 Hugo Awards—one of science fiction and fantasy’s most prestigious awards, decided by the popular vote of WorldCon members—were presented on Sunday night at the 80th WorldCon in Chicago, in a ceremony hosted by Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz. Here are the winners in the literary

Several years ago, while cataloguing the thousands of photographs in my collection of antique images, I found that I had hundreds of photographs of people with their dogs. While intrigued, I was not surprised that my love for dogs seemed to have become integrated with my passion for antique photographs, if even on a subconscious

The following first appeared in Lit Hub’s The Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. For a period in the late 2010s, I had the good fortune of belonging to a regular poker game. Whenever someone new would join us, confessing they didn’t really know how to play, my friend Mike and I would tell them, “That means you’re

September 2, 2022, 10:00am Well…not proof. But very ornate conjecture. Remember the penultimate sequence of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? For those who don’t: after an impossibly full day of truancy (could he really have attended a Cubs game and toured the Art Institute and lunched at a fancy restaurant and performed in the Von Steuben

TODAY: In 1897, Sally Benson, best known for her semi-autobiographical stories collected in Meet Me in St. Louis, is born.      “Once in awhile, something explodes, but August is August.” Myroslav Laiuk on life in Kyiv, August 2022. | Lit Hub Ukraine How to write a book without getting in your own way: On self-hatred, the semblance