Literature

August 26, 2022, 11:48am Congratulations to Tess Gunty, whose critically acclaimed debut novel The Rabbit Hutch has just won the inaugural Waterstones debut fiction prize. The novel (about four teenagers—recently aged out of the state foster-care system—living together in an apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest), was selected as winner by a panel of Waterstones

August 26, 2022, 11:49am Anne Hathaway, in my eyes, can do no wrong. She captured our childhood hearts in Ella Enchanted and The Princess Diaries. She made us laugh in Get Smart and cry in Les Mis. Most importantly, she prepared us for the grueling years we’d endure as assistants in The Devil Wears Prada. The hits just keep

TODAY: In 1856, Ivan Franko, author of the first detective novels and modern poetry in the Ukrainian language, is born.    Jincy Willett on how (and why) to base a character on yourself. | Lit Hub Craft “Why take a cast of a dead person’s face when so many people cannot bear to look at the

August 26, 2022, 12:03pm Sometime around 2006, everyone in publishing began to lament the death of the book section. In the face of declining readership, budget cuts, and mergers, newspapers began to realize that book review sections did not bring in enough ad revenue to cover their costs and so cut and culled until there

Love is obviously a key subject in much classic poetry. But what are the best sensual love poems ever written: those poems which carry an erotic frisson which speaks of desire as well as devotion? Below, we select and introduce some of the very best sensual love poems which are more than just conventional love

August 26, 2022, 1:39pm May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan. Just ahead of its premiere at the Venice Film Festival next week, the first trailer for White Noise—Noah Baumbach’s black comedy apocalyptic disaster film based on the 1985 novel by Don DeLillo—has finally

August 24, 2022, 11:09am Jesus. A Texas woman actually went into her local police station—in a town called Katy, just west of Houston—to file a complaint about a book in the Jordan High School library. According to the Houston Chronicle: A Katy ISD police officer temporarily removed a copy of a book from a high

‘A Description of the Morning’ is a 1709 poem by the Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Published in The Tatler, Swift’s poem displays his keen eye for contemporary detail as he satirises elements of early eighteenth-century London. ‘A Description of the Morning’ is written in heroic couplets: iambic pentameter rhyming couplets. The couplets are closed,

August 24, 2022, 11:41am When the Lit Hub staff worked out of an office, some among us were very fond of harmless workplace pranks. (Some day we’ll publish the oral history of the time we replaced the first page of Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline with the first page of a Lit Hub editor’s

August 23, 2022, 11:58am For the second year, the nation (of TikTok users and the middle-aged journalists who write about them) has been gripped by the phenomenon that is sorority rush week at the University of Alabama. As a middle-aged person who is not TikTok literate but who nevertheless enjoys social phenomena, I’ve read a

August 23, 2022, 1:41pm As mass hysteria continues to target American students’ access to information in books, there’s some particularly disheartening news coming out of Oklahoma this week. Wendy Suares, an anchor at KOKH FOX 25, reported on Twitter that a teacher at Norman High School in Norman, Oklahoma, was fired for speaking to students

August 22, 2022, 3:42pm What could one say about Dorothy Parker that hasn’t already been said, especially here at Literary Hub dot com? She was a revered critic and essayist, known for her witty one-liners. She inspired Nora Ephron. She worked on the script for It’s a Wonderful Life. She famously hated Winnie-the-Pooh. (And in one

Postmodernism came to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century. As the name suggests, postmodernism developed out of modernism: it came after modernism, both in the sense that it chronologically followed it, and in the sense of extending, and to some extent critiquing, the aims and attitudes of modernism. Characteristics of postmodern fiction

August 22, 2022, 10:50am Chew on this, Armie Hammer. After the success of 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, Luca Guadagnino and Timothée Chalamet have reunited for a new literary adaptation—this time without Hammer, despite the fact that the project is a coming-of-age story about teenage cannibals in love. Yes, seriously. I know cannibalism is

As host of the Keen On show, I get to ask my smart guests dumb questions. The smarter the guest sometimes, I confess, the dumber the question. This week, for example, I couldn’t resist asking the classically dumb question about the future to Brad Feld, a particularly prescient venture capitalist and start-up tech author.   How

In 1991, two years after he had started to write the Sandman graphic novels, Neil Gaiman received the first of many offers to adapt his curious comics to the screen. In some ways, this was an early testament to the unexpected power of Gaiman’s series, given the fact that The Sandman was a kind of

TODAY: In 1687, Samuel Richardson, author of Pamela, a book many consider the first modern English novel, is born.   “She could never be anything but herself, and as herself she was absolutely riveting on-screen.” Alice Sedgwick Wohl on Edie Sedgwick’s first movies with Andy Warhol. | Lit Hub Biography Beth Macy, author of Dopesick,

TODAY: In 1881, British-born American poet Edgar Albert Guest is born.   Dana Milbank considers the Republican Party’s embrace of political violence before January 6th—including Sarah Palin’s call to arms and crosshairs image over Gabby Giffords’s district. | Lit Hub Politics “I am a performer and a monk.” Sidik Fofano on being a shy debut author. | Lit Hub Writing