Literature

August 8, 2022, 2:59pm The Book Industry Charitable Foundation (BINC)—which helps bookstore owners and employees with unforeseen emergency financial needs—is this week urging people to donate money to help a number of flood-ravaged bookstores in St. Louis and eastern Kentucky. Recent torrential rains in the region have had a devastating impact on independent bookstores like

Fiction often deals with domestic matters, including family, and some of the finest short stories treat the important, though sometimes fraught, relationship between parents and their children. What makes a good parent? What if two parents disagree over what’s best for their children, or for the family as a whole? The following short stories are

August 8, 2022, 11:30am Wow. According to this excerpt posted at The New Yorker this morning, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Donald Trump, was genuinely worried that the then-president was using Hitler as a role model for acquiring and consolidating power. The following is from Susan B. Glasser and

In 2008, after 13 years together, my literary agent and I parted ways. (To preserve her anonymity, let’s call her Michael Ovitz.) Between 1995 and 2002, Michael Ovitz sold two of my novels, including my debut, Hunger Point. By any measure, our partnership was a terrific success. Michael Ovitz and I were more than just

The following first appeared in Lit Hub’s The Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. You could go mad trying to write about a city. Taking the city as your subject, that is, and building a fiction around and within it. I’ve just tried it myself and I can tell you that it’s a fairly bewildering experience. My subject,

In Bodies Bodies Bodies, the new film from director Halina Reijn and writers Sarah DeLappe and Kristen Roupenian (of “Cat Person” fame), a group of mean, rich, and very high twentysomethings weather a storm in a huge mansion, believing one among them to be a killer after the lights go out and a party game

TODAY: In 1917, Barbara Cooney, illustrator of over 100 children’s books and National Book Award winner (Miss Rumphius), is born.    Ella Risbridger muses on the pain-writing-money trifecta, Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, and memoir as fiction. | Lit Hub Criticism Lulu Miller in praise of “the uncrushable beetle.” | Lit Hub Nature How Kiki de Montparnasse, a muse with a

The following is from Alejandro Zambra’s first novel Bonsai. Zambra is the award-winning author of the novels Chilean Poet, Ways of Going Home, The Private Lives of Trees, as well as two other works of fiction: Multiple Choice and My Documents. His short stories have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times

What are some of the best short stories about childhood, and the experiences of children? Although there are dozens of classic tales about those formative years, the following stories represent, for our money, some of the finest stories about children taking the rocky path of knowledge and experience towards adulthood. Not all of them are

TODAY: In 1934, American novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer Wendell Berry is born.    Adam Scovell travels back to the Wirral Peninsula, “determined to find some of the old ghosts that haunted Malcolm Lowry.” | Lit Hub Criticism On Shahrzad Mozafar and other Muslim women who fought for a forbidden love: the

August 4, 2022, 1:36pm Rumors have been confirmed that the internet’s favorite celebrity, Keanu Reeves, will star in an 8-part adaptation of Erik Larson’s 2003 bestseller, The Devil in the White City, which tells the story of Daniel H. Burnham, a demanding but visionary architect who races to make his mark on history with the

‘The Widow and the Parrot’ is not one of Virginia Woolf’s best-known works. But then how many people familiar with The Waves or Mrs Dalloway are even aware that Woolf wrote a short story for children? Woolf wrote ‘The Widow and the Parrot’ in the early 1920s for  the family newspaper edited by her nephews

August 4, 2022, 9:07am It’s a tale as old as time: a Brazilian writer sets her Kindle aside for a few weeks to work on her own novel, and when she goes back to get a little reading done, finds that the device has been infested with a horde of tiny white ants. “My virtual

The following is from Andrea Abreu’s debut novel Dogs of Summer, translated by Julia Sanches. Abreu was born in 1995 in Tenerife, Spain. In 2021, Granta named her one of the best Spanish writers under the age of 35. Dogs of Summer will be translated into 13 languages and adapted for the screen by El

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) was not a prolific poet, but her body of work is a substantial one and marks her out as one of the great poets of the twentieth century. However, the newcomer may find it difficult to find a good starting-point. With Sylvia Plath we might start with ‘Daddy’ or ‘Lady Lazarus’; Marianne

August 3, 2022, 9:18am A bookseller who fled Hong Kong because of Chinese repression is going to plead his case to Nancy Pelosi during her headline-making visit to Taiwan. Lam Wing-kee, a longtime human rights activist and bookstore owner in Hong Kong, was jailed for eight months in 2015 for selling books critical of Chinese

‘Babylon Revisited’ is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1931. Dealing with some of the prominent themes of Fitzgerald’s most famous work, The Great Gatsby, ‘Babylon Revisited’ is about alienation, guilt, dissipation, and making amends, among other themes. ‘Babylon Revisited’: plot summary The story centres

August 2, 2022, 2:19pm A lawsuit over Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water and New York state prisons is just the latest example of states’ absurd approach to literature in prisons, a phenomenon that PEN America has called “the largest book ban policy in the United States.” Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison