From lithub.com
One great short story to read today: Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter.”
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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 sing…
10h ago
From lithub.com
What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week
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Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message, and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Third Realm all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit H…
10h ago
From lithub.com
AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of October
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Each month, our friends at AudioFile Magazine share a curated list of the best audiobooks for your literary listening pleasure. * OCTOBER FICTION We Came to Welcome You: A Novel of Suburban Horror …
11h ago
From lithub.com
Pilsner Goes to America: How Beer Got Big in the 19th Century
1 3
On October 5, 1842, a gruff Bavarian brewmaster named Josef Groll created the original Pilsner beer using ingredients from the Bohemian countryside: aromatic Saaz hops from the Žatec basin, golden …
on Tue, 5PM
From lithub.com
False Profits: Why I Am Not Teaching in the Classroom This Fall
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This week, my colleagues at the Medill School of Journalism are returning to Northwestern University’s campuses in Chicago, Evanston, Qatar, and Washington to begin teaching and learning with our b…
on Sep 17
From lithub.com
How the Weimar Republic’s Hyperinflation Transformed Gender Relations in Germany
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One of the social dividends of post-war inflation in Weimar Germany was greater independence for women. It’s no coincidence that the locus for this was on the dance floor. The dance-hall clientele …
on Sep 5
From lithub.com
Editing Without Ego: How Katharine S. White Quietly Shaped The New Yorker’s Writers
1 3
Katharine S. White wanted to remain invisible. She had a horror of seeming egotistical or self-promoting, but even more than that, she believed her work belonged in the background. Her husband, E.B…
on Sep 4
From lithub.com
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Saturday was a gloriously beautiful spring day in Chicago, and as I wandered into the “Liberation Zone” which has taken over DePaul University’s quad, a kind lady asked me if I would like some lunc…
#academia #highered #gazaprotests #policingthecampus
on May 10
From lithub.com
A Vanishing World: On Europe’s Disappearing Peasantry
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You travel north from my father’s house on the Galway-Mayo border in Ireland’s far West. North and west of you and never far away lies the Atlantic Ocean. Belderrig is reached after a long drive, f…
on Mar 5
From lithub.com
On the Dangerous Weaponization of Antisemitism Against Pro-Palestine Protests
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The press and especially the news channels are constantly warning us that antisemitism is everywhere on the rise. They don’t point to specific episodes, content instead to denounce an ancient preju…
23h ago
From lithub.com
In American Empire, You’re Either Invading or Being Invaded
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Whether it’s via lies told about immigrants, the ongoing violence of borders, the justification of exploding pagers, the expansion of the Overton Window to include once nearly unimaginable horrors,…
on Fri, 6AM
From lithub.com
I Hate This Jerk in My Book Club: Am I the Literary Asshole?
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Hello again, friends! Welcome back to Am I the Literary Asshole?, the biweekly advice column that takes your question, flips it and reverses it (channeling either Missy Elliott or an Uno card here)…
on Fri, 5AM
From lithub.com
Chowder and Community: In Praise of Warm Meals and Warm Hearts
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Early in Moby-Dick, Ishmael and Queequeg row into the Nantucket harbor one mean December night, following some “crooked directions” to the Try Pots—a restaurant so famous for its chowder its yard i…
on Thu, 8PM
From lithub.com
The Tyranny of the Best-Of List: On Navigating Book Lists with OCD
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“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said as middle school me took a seat in my church’s drab, windowless confessional. Opposite our parish priest, I uncrumpled a piece of paper that containe…
on Wed, 8PM
From lithub.com
Ten World-Spanning New Children’s Books Out in October
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One of the things I like most about my city neighborhood is the fact that so many of the people who live here come from different countries around the world. At the playground on a Saturday morning…
on Wed, 7PM
From lithub.com
Footnotes All the Way Down: How Russian Poetry Mines the Past to Reveal the Present
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Nina Iskrenko was a mother of two. She was educated as a physicist, though she wanted to study music. One of the prominent Moscow poets wanting to tear free from the traditional formal, rhymed stan…
on Wed, 11AM
From lithub.com
Ta-Nehisi Coates! Joyce Carol Oates! Karl Ove Knausgaard! 27 new books out today.
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The wheel of the year never stops turning, and October, suddenly, is here. For many of us, the fall can be a time both of harvests and loss, a time of fire and fading, life and death. For many Amer…
on Wed, 5AM
From lithub.com
So, you want to read some horror? Here’s a spooky season starter kit for the genre-curious.
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Ah, October: some might say it’s the best month of the year. (It is.) Certainly, it is the spookiest (although Charles Dickens might argue for December) and by the time you read this, I have …
on Wed, 1AM
From lithub.com
Weird No More: On Loving and Leaving Austin, Texas
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I knew why we’d left Austin after calling it home for so long; how the humidity and searing heat had taken its toll after 17 years; how my wife and I were tired of worrying about keeping our daught…
on Tue, 8PM
From lithub.com
The Price of “Progress.” On Development, Displacement and Dictatorship in the Amazon
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What is Mine was born from an intellectual unrest and an intimate desire. The unrest: was it possible to narrate the history of a society from the trajectory of an “ordinary man”? The desire: to li…
on Tue, 1PM
From lithub.com
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Zanya took quick, confident strides across the road toward the church construction site, the uneven hem of his trousers striking his ankles. In a few minutes, he’d have them rolled to his knees, st…
on Tue, 9AM
From lithub.com
Remembering the Life and Work of Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, Translator and Activist
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On September 6, Turkish-American human rights activist Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi was shot in the head by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) sniper during a peaceful protest against illegal Israeli settlements …
on Tue, 2AM
From lithub.com
Encounters with the Local Possum; Or, How Safety Can Hide Wonder from Us
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September arrived and looked very much like August. Hot, muggy, and buggy. The weather was rich and sweet and, in the classic character of summer, seemed to insist that it would be so forever. Cold…
on Mon, 9PM
From lithub.com
M.L. Rio on the Connection Between Writing and Dreams
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This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Dreams are one of those things professors and editors and more seasoned writers all tell you not to write about. It’s a da…
on Mon, 6PM
From lithub.com
Bell-ends, Pillocks, Numpties, and Sh*tgibbons: Why the Brits Swear Better
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My book Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English—an outgrowth of the Not One-Off Britishisms blog—looks at several hundred words and phrases that have made their way across the pond—inc…
on Mon, 11AM
From lithub.com
Between the Lines: What Is Missing in the Diversity in Publishing Discourse
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On Saturdays in late ’90s, my father, a taxi driver, would pool his tips for the week and take me, a child too precocious for his own good, to a local bookstore in search of my next read. Together,…
on Sat, 7PM
From lithub.com
What Romance Writing Shares With Sports Journalism
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When I was younger, I thought I was going to become a sports reporter. I read all the good journalism I could find, wrote a column for my college paper, interned at Sports Illustrated. Life took me…
on Sep 27
From lithub.com
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Angus’s feet always warn me of his coming. My women move with delicacy, steps barely whispering through the crushed oyster shells that line the path to our fastness. The monks always come in pairs,…
on Sep 27
From lithub.com
The Surreal, Destabilizing Strangeness of Poetry: A Conversation with Michael Leong
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For this next installment in this long-running interview series, contributing editor Peter Mishler corresponded with Michael Leong. Leong is a poet, critic, editor, and educator. His most recent bo…
on Sep 27
From lithub.com
Why Robots Won’t Be Taking Over the World Anytime Soon
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The woman waved her clipboard as the crowds grew around her. Flapping away on the exhibition floor at the ExCeL conference center in east London, she sounded irritated: a key person was missing, no…
on Sep 26
From lithub.com
What Fiction Writers Can Learn from Dungeons & Dragons
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In the late 1980s, my friends and I knew something called Dungeons & Dragons existed—and we knew that it was for us. But no shop in our little upstate New York hometown carried the books, and t…
on Sep 26
From lithub.com
“Good Medicine and a Very Bad Drug…” Reckoning With the Deadly Duality of Fentanyl
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The bowling ball on my chest is always heaviest at 3 a.m. Its steady pressure pushes me out of sleep most mornings before the sun rises on either coast. I could set my alarm by it, but I don’t need…
on Sep 26
From lithub.com
The 16 Best Book Covers of September
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Another month of books, another month of book covers. Well, Big Book Season has begun, and with it the attendant Big Book Jackets, many of which, this year, seem to be drawing from the archives, to…
on Sep 26
From lithub.com
Why Everything We Think We Know About Spies Is Wrong
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In the movies, spies are usually ripped hunks who carry lots of gadgets, like James Bond and Jason Bourne. That’s rarely the case in real life, however. When the Office of Strategic Services,…
on Sep 25
From lithub.com
Calling all comrades! Your favorite leftie publishing house needs a kickstart.
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Attention, bookworms and fellow travelers! Verso, the beloved left wing publishing house and hub for radical thought, is in big financial trouble. The company’s UK distributor, Marston Book Publish…
on Sep 25
From lithub.com
500 international publishers demand Frankfurt Book Fair cut ties with Israel.
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Publishers for Palestine, a global solidarity collective of more than 500 publishers in 50 countries, has issued an open letter to the Frankfurt Book Fair (the world’s largest trade fair for …
on Sep 25
From lithub.com
The Forgotten Female Novelist Who Foresaw Ecology, Environmentalism, and Realist Fiction
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Shortly before she died, Harriet Martineau began erasing herself. In an autobiographical obituary published two days after Martineau’s death in 1876, the writer dismissed her own popular and well-r…
on Sep 25
From lithub.com
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Olga Tokarczuk has won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Book International Prize, among many other honors. She is the author of a dozen works of fiction, two collections of essays, and a c…
on Sep 25
From lithub.com
How Racist Policies Destroyed Public Housing and Created the American Suburbs
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World War II reorganized the economy and geography of the United States. By the 1940s, pushed by Jim Crow and pulled by employment in war industries, more than six million Black people relocated to…
on Sep 25
From lithub.com
Painting Emotion: How Claude Monet Turned His Inner Life Into Art
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During the overcast summer of 1879, in the riverside village of Vétheuil halfway between Paris and Rouen, a restless painter paced his garden, waiting for an hour’s sunshine. When the cloud lifted,…
on Sep 25
From lithub.com
Smaller, shorter books aren’t the only way to make publishing more climate friendly.
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The BBC published a story the other day on the push towards shorter and slimmer books, as a potential way for publishers to save money and reduce their climate impact. According to a 2021 study, a …
on Sep 25
From lithub.com
What Organized Labor Movements Today Need to Learn from the Cold War Era’s Failures
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In the late 1940s, the onset of the Cold War and the accompanying Red Scare in the United States significantly constrained the labor movement. After several years of dynamic growth and unprecedente…
on Sep 25
From lithub.com
Freedom and Responsibility: Why Earth’s Survival Depends on All of Us
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Once upon a time all history was environmental history. Life was governed by the seasons. When the weather gods were fickle, misery followed. Human societies used their ingenuity to wield fire, dam…
on Sep 25
From lithub.com
Earth is about to get a second moon… but what will it mean for the lit world?
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For a brief window between September 29th and November 25th, Earth’s gravity is going to pluck a passing, bus-sized asteroid out of space and pull it into our orbit. This second, mini moon will set…
on Sep 25
From lithub.com
How the Work of Thomas Dixon Shaped White America’s Racist Fantasies
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In 1883, Thomas Dixon graduated from Wake Forest College with more honors than any student had ever received. Dixon then attended graduate school at Johns Hopkins University and would go on to ente…
on Sep 25
From lithub.com
Richard Powers on Chronicling Our Relationship With Nature and Technology
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Richard Powers’ new novel, Playground, is a brilliant, edgily futurist, surprisingly playful commentary on where the Fourth Industrial Revolution is taking us, with a cast of intriguing characters …
on Sep 24
From lithub.com
Isabella Hammad’s (Incomplete) Essential List of Books About Palestine
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There are a very many great books about Palestine and by Palestinians, and to condense them into a single essential list is a difficult task. Some books recently celebrated in the anglosphere, eith…
on Sep 24
From lithub.com
How Jack London Foresaw the Anti-Democratic Future With The Iron Heel
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In one of the most prescient dystopian works ever written, the narrator describes how the party in government, having lost an election, declined to leave office. “The incumbents refused to get out.…
on Sep 24
From lithub.com
How to Pay Attention: On the Value of Stillness and Silence in All Seasons
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Silence and stillness are your greatest tools as a naturalist. Take care not to frighten anybody. Sit quietly and let the world come to you. Trying to get close to a wild animal will only distress …
on Sep 24
From lithub.com
WTF is Steve reading on Sex and the City?
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In an act of Zoomer solidarity, I too am rewatching Sex and the City. And as enough ink has been spilled about how this infamous franchise hits in 2024, I’m paying special attention to the mi…
on Sep 23