Literature

The rights of LGBTQ+ Americans are under threat. After generations of struggle, sacrifice, and resistance saw queer Americans earn a modicum of equality in the eyes of the law, an unduly powerful minority of religious conservatives, at all levels of government, is doing everything possible to take those rights away. So as we celebrate this

TODAY: In 1912, English author Mary Wesley, who famously published her first novel for adults at 70, is born.   HAPPY PRIDE: Billy-Ray Belcourt wants a whole literature of queer indigenous possibility • Zeyn Joukhadar on the fantastical futures that trans people of color deserve • 111 queer books recommended by librarians, booksellers, and authors • Queer readings

June 24, 2022, 8:44am Remember that exhausting parade of Trump insiders and ex-staffers getting book deals for dishy tell-alls? Turns out no one’s really interested in reading them. Politico went digging around NPD Bookscan (which reflects about 70 percent of sales) to get the receipts: The Chief’s Chief [by former chief of staff Mark Meadows]

June 24, 2022, 9:32am Last week I posted about a bunch of loser Proud Boys who attacked a queer-friendly drag queen story time in San Diego. As ever with these sad-sack wannabe Brownshirts there’s a distinctly pathetic element to their bullying, derived as it is from vast inner bog lands of self-loathing insecurity. But last

From ghost stories to chilling horror tales to short retellings of classic fairy tales, the short story form has often been at home to the supernatural. Below, we select and introduce ten of the very best short stories which feature some supernatural element: a ghost, a magical talisman, a werewolf, or some other fantastical or

June 24, 2022, 11:19am Following the recent onslaught of attacks on LGBTQ+ rights across the nation, the Smithtown Library Board of Trustees passed a resolution on June 21st to remove all Pride month displays from their children’s sections across all four buildings in the library’s district. The New York Library Association was quick to release

June 23, 2022, 11:10am A trailer for the musical adaptation of Bernard Waber’s beloved children’s book, Lyle, Lyle Crocodile has dropped, and it’s… well, here it is: [embedded content] Though this website previously and breathlessly reported that Javier Bardem would be playing Lyle himself in the film, in fact, Lyle is voiced by Shawn Mendes.

‘Memoirs of a Yellow Dog’ is a story by the US short-story writer O. Henry, whose real name was William Sydney Porter (1862-1910). In this 1903 story, the yellow dog of the story’s title recounts his life, his owners, and his love for his master (and his dislike for his master’s wife). Man and dog

June 23, 2022, 12:21pm I was first introduced to the great Frances McDormand as a pig-tailed, knife-wielding women’s studies professor in the Nancy Meyers’ film Something’s Gotta Give, which might remain my favorite role of hers—you know, sentimentally—but there’s a lot more where that came from, including Sarah Polley’s forthcoming adaptation of Miriam Toews’ novel

June 22, 2022, 2:14pm Julie Otsuka is one of the greatest and most important writers of our time. I will die on this hill. Here at Literary Hub dot com, I have very adamantly and repeatedly made a case for The Buddha in the Attic being one of the best books ever, for the way she

The poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) has given us a number of phrases which have passed into common use: ‘green and pleasant land’ and ‘chariot of fire’ are just two of many examples. But what are the best Blake quotations, and what do they mean? In which of his works do they appear? Below,

June 22, 2022, 10:50am George Chauncey just became the first scholar of LGBTQ history to win the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, a $500,000 award for those whose work “advances understanding of the human experience.” Chauncey, the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of

June 21, 2022, 10:01am It was always pretty apparent that Russian journalist Dmitri A. Muratov is not particularly concerned with state authority, and is willing to put his life in harm’s way in defense of the truth. A stalwart of Russia’s perpetually embattled independent press, Muratov was awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for his

‘The Witness’ is a short text by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Not quite a short story and yet not an essay either, ‘The Witness’ runs to just two paragraphs and one page of text, and is a meditation on the passing of the last people to remember, or to have witnessed, dead

June 21, 2022, 10:14am In Jean-Paul Sartre’s novella The Childhood of a Leader, he wrote that there is “more destructive power” in pranks “than in all the works of Lenin.” Well, maybe if you are a headmaster who finds yourself unable to control a pack of unruly existentialist (graduate) students. In 1925, when Sartre was a

June 17, 2022, 8:45am Australian novelist John Hughes—who, as The Guardian reported earlier this week, plagiarized sections of his novel The Dogs from the extremely obscure novels All Quiet on the Western Front, Anna Karenina, and The Great Gatsby—has offered a rebuttal to claim(/fact) that he is a plagiarist: No, I’m not. Hughes wrote a bizarre defense in

How did Atlas, the figure from Greek mythology, come to give his name to a book of maps? And how did he give his name to one of the most famous geographical features in the world? Let’s take a closer look at the Atlas myth. Atlas was a Titan who was punished by being made

Juneteenth is for celebration. We celebrate the vitality and creativity of Black people, individually and collectively. But it’s a complicated kind of celebration, because it asks us to recognize that America’s democracy is structured by racial caste hierarchies—a matrix of exclusions, privileges and unequal life-chances derived from ideas about racial difference, and rooted in our