Literature

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The Book of Hosea is one of the twelve short prophetic books which conclude the canonical Old Testament. For this reason, Hosea is often known as one of the ‘minor’ prophets, because this book, and the other eleven short books which make up ‘the twelve’, are less lengthy and

In the fall of 2012, I said goodbye to my thirteen-year-old cat, Snowflake. The grief was breathtaking, in a literal sense: it took the wind out of me. I had tried to brace myself, but I’ve since learned that it’s impossible to prepare. In the days and weeks that followed, I couldn’t focus and barely

July 7, 2023, 10:10am This week I’ve been pressing my degrees together between my tented fingers to figure out how a book that I did not recommend—nor did any other Critic—became a bestseller. How? I’m led to believe that someone named Colleen Hoover simply started publishing books from Texas, of all places, and, 23 books

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ is one of many classic songs by the Manchester group The Smiths. More than this, it is one of many classic songs to appear on a single album, The Queen Is Dead (1986), the album which represented the peak of the band’s success and powers. On

July 7, 2023, 11:17am AI can’t “learn” unless it has something to train on. Authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay are suing OpenAI on the grounds that ChatGPT, an OpenAI product, used their copyrighted material to improve the model, reports The Guardian: Books are ideal for training large language models because they tend to contain

TODAY: In 1923, Nella Larsen graduates from the NYPL’s Library School and becomes the first professionally trained Black librarian.    How Franz Kafka achieved cult status in Cold War America: Brian K. Goodman traces the origins of the term “Kafkaesque.” | Lit Hub Criticism “I am almost always the main character in my stories of my parents’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Ye cannot serve God and mammon’. This is one of many famous Bible quotations. Indeed, it is one of many famous quotations from the New Testament. More specifically, it is one of many famous quotations from a single moment in the New Testament: the Sermon on the Mount. But

July 7, 2023, 11:59am Yu and Me Books opened in December 2021 on Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and was named for owner Lucy Yu’s mother. It was the first Asian-American woman-owned bookstore on the island. Following a July 4, 2023, fire in a neighboring residential unit, the store has lost most of its inventory

At first glance, director and screenwriter Celine Song’s debut film, Past Lives, seems to be made specifically for someone like me: an Asian American female writer, a resident of a large East city, an aging millennial obsessed with the film’s lead actress, Greta “Sweet Birthday Baby” Lee. But this first-blush recognition of myself in Nora

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Written by George Michael in 1979 when he was still a teenager, ‘Careless Whisper’ became a number one hit in 1984 on both sides of the Atlantic, topping both the UK and US singles charts. This song, which remains a karaoke and dancefloor classic, is beloved by millions; yet

July 6, 2023, 3:44pm On a beautiful Sunday at the end of April, I attended an illustrious event at Downtown Manhattan’s Metrograph movie theater: a screening of the Paul Schrader classic 2017 film First Reformed followed by a discussion with Schrader, himself. But this was more than a special showing, it was a celebration commemorating

TODAY: In 1859, Swedish poet, novelist, and Nobel Prize laureate Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam is born.         Here are the 166 titles we’ll be reading in the second half of the year. | Lit Hub Reading Lists “I am almost always the main character in my stories of my parents’ music.” Keziah Weir reflects on

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666’ is a poem by Anne Bradstreet (1612-72), a Puritan poet who was the first person in America, male or female, to have a book of poems published. In 1650 her volume The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America

July shone bright in our 2023 SFF preview, with a bevy of dying-to-read books from Chuck Tingle, Daniel Abraham, Kemi Ashing-Giwa, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. But if you can believe it, those picks were hard-won, with so many more to choose from. Basically, I’ve been waiting half a year to tell you about the rest of

Even though Franz Kafka had been dead since 1924, his writing would provide Cold War-era writers and intellectuals in the United States with a literary vocabulary for imagining life behind the Iron Curtain. After the Second World War, a wave of new Kafka translations, editions, and critical works swept across the English-speaking world. In retrospect,

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Let’s take a closer look at some of the most notable quotations from one of Ray Bradbury’s very best stories, ‘The Veldt’ (1952). The story must certainly rank among Bradbury’s most unsettling, because it suggests that children have the capacity to do terrible things, and to turn on the

The following is from Mihret Sibhat’s The History of a Difficult Child. Sibhat was born and raised in a small town in western Ethiopia before moving to California when she was seventeen. A graduate of California State University, Northridge, and the University of Minnesota’s MFA program, she was a 2019 A Public Space Fellow and

Michael Finkel’s The Art Thief, Jennifer Ackerman’s What An Owl Knows, and Sarah Viren’s To Name the Bigger Lie all feature among the best reviewed nonfiction titles of the month. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.” * 1. The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a