Literature

May 17, 2023, 10:00am According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we recommend: “A

TODAY: In 1873, Dorothy Richardson, author of Pilgrimage, a sequence of 13 novels, is born. She was one of the earliest modernist novelists to use stream of consciousness as a narrative technique. (Pictured here with husband, illustrator Alan Odle.)   Also on Lit Hub: Nine utopian books to deprogram our brains • Obsessing over UFO videos—or,

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘22’ is a classic example of a pop song whose meaning appears straightforward but is, in fact, slightly more complex and ambiguous once we probe under the surface. Taken from her fourth album Red (2012), ‘22’ is in some ways a quintessential Taylor Swift song, combining poppy and uptempo

May 16, 2023, 11:36am Benedict Cumberbatch—the Oscar-nominated star of Power of the Dog, The Imitation Game, and Patrick Melrose, as well as all of those epilepsy-inducing Marvel movies—has signed on to play the lead (not the crow) in an upcoming film adaptation of Max Porter’s 2015 novel, Grief is the Thing With Feathers. Porter’s debut, which

TODAY: In 1955, James Agee dies at 45.     Abraham Verghese talks about writing The Covenant of Water, his memories of Kerala, humanism in medicine, and more. | Lit Hub In Conversation Say hello to 24 new books out today. | The Hub Emma Cline recommends baths as productive procrastination, and other insights from the

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘A Woman Speaks’ is a poem by the African-American poet Audre Lorde (1934-92), published in her 1978 collection The Black Unicorn. Lorde was a self-described ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.’ In the poem, a Black woman addresses society and warns that she has not forgotten the powerful magic of

May 15, 2023, 11:28am The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of American (SFWA) has announced the winners of the 2022 Nebula Awards, one of SFF’s most prestigious honors, “given to the writers of the most outstanding speculative fiction works released in 2022.” Here are the winners: NOVEL R.F. Kuang, Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An

The following is from Karin Lin-Greenberg’s You Are Here. Lin-Greenberg is a Chinese American, award-winning writer. She is the author of two short story collections, Faulty Predictions and Vanished. Her fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Story, and Boulevard among others. Her short story “The Sweeper of Hair,” the basis of this novel’s opening

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Pablo Neruda (1904-73) is undoubtedly the most famous Chilean poet, and perhaps the greatest love poet in all of Latin-American literature. Neruda, who was born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (Pablo Neruda was his pen name, though he later changed it officially), won the Nobel Prize for Literature in

Mother’s Day was never a real holiday to my mother—more about marketing than raising me. No white carnations or special dinners for her. But that my memoir about her, Irma: The Education of a Mother’s Son, was published just before this Mother’s Day would make her smile. Likewise, that I have written about her at

May 12, 2023, 10:00am According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we recommend: “Rebecca”

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Yolande Cornelia ‘Nikki’ Giovanni Jr, born in 1943, is one of the best-known African-American poets in the world. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award, while an album of her poetry, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection, was nominated

TODAY: In 1974, French poet, dramatist, and novelist Jean Aicard dies at 73.    Jennifer Banks considers the moral and political failure to “meet mothers with the full force of our intellects.” | Lit Hub History Tracing the evolution of celebrity memoirs, from Charles Lindbergh to Will Smith. | Lit Hub On Frankenstein’s complicated relationship with science. | Lit

May 12, 2023, 12:27pm Move over, Dame Hellen Mirren, there’s a new Patricia Highsmith in town. Shailene Woodley, star of Big Little Lies and [checks Wikipedia] a lot of films I’ve never heard of (sorry, I am old and there are so many YA things…), will play the lead in an upcoming genre biopic of

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The Book of Job is one of the famous and yet one of the least understood books of the Old Testament. ‘The patience of Job’ and ‘Job’s comforters’ have become proverbial idioms which emerged from the book’s popularity and ubiquity; and yet how patient was Job, and who were

May 12, 2023, 12:36pm It’s this little American’s first time watching the Eurovision Song Contest (streaming on Peacock), an activity I never thought would overlap with Lit Hub dot com… until Austria performed at last night’s semi-finals with their (already TikTok famous) song “Who the Hell Is Edgar?”—a banger, according to some (me) about being

Every single mother I’ve ever met is the same. In romance novels, I mean. It’s almost as though the authors are working from a shared set of ideas about how a single mother must look and behave in order to earn the bliss of a new relationship. For starters, she must have just one unplanned

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson (1864-1941) was an Australian ‘bush poet’, born near Orange in New South Wales to a Scottish father and Australian-born mother. His poems are best read aloud, as all true ballads are (or even sung, as the most famous Banjo Paterson poem is – and we’ll