The Best of Literary Hub

I’ve been on the hunt for books by women for as long as I can remember. My favorite stories are usually not romances, but stories of women trying to make sense of how they can be the main character…

Chang-Rae Lee’s A Tender Age, Virginia Eubanks’s A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving, and Téa Obreht’s Sunrise all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks…

Now that our president is minting gold coins with his face on them, building a triumphal arch, and sponsoring blood sport in the capital, it seems like a good time to read up on ancient Rome. That’…

Per a 404 Media report published this morning, Amazon, that evil empire, “is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.”…

Let’s be honest about something: the fact that writing is hard has nothing to do with how talented you are, how many ideas you have, or how much you want to have finished your novel. Writing …

In certain borghi (small medieval villages) in Lunigiana several centuries ago, some impoverished mountain people, pushed by necessity, began climbing the arduous paths of the Apennines and then de…

On November 22, 1963—the day on which President Kennedy arrived in Dallas to lay the groundwork for his 1964 reelection campaign and Richard Hofstadter set off from Oxford to attend a dinner party …

For well over a century now, families have sported rows of rictus grins for the camera, but the subgenre of family portraiture (and, later, video clips) dedicated to conception, gestation, and birt…

I work in the Art Department at HarperCollins, where I have a front-row seat to the conversations that shape how books appear in the world. What kind of cover art reads as “literary” versus “commer…

How do we keep doing this—making art? My question can be read in two ways: What keeps us alive in our art; on what do we draw, year after year and project after project, to keep doing this? And, wh…

For anyone who pays attention to major literary awards, it will come as no surprise that university presses figure prominently among celebrated and vigorous publishers of contemporary poetry. In th…

I first read Einstein’s Dreams in 1993, very shortly after it was published. The author, Alan Lightman, is a physicist at MIT whose writings have illuminated the intersection of science and the hum…

Last week, The New York Times Book Review published a list of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” (Well, so far, obviously. Why not just call it the best books of the last 25 year…

Umberto Eco has examined our ongoing fascination with the Middle Ages and listed ten different versions including the “shaggy medievalism” of works like Beowulf. Much of J.R.R. Tolkien’…

How do novel reviews begin? Just like novels very often: Motherless boys may be pitied by mothers but are not infrequently envied by other boys. For the friends of the Piontek family, August 31st, …

We’ve reached the final matchup in our legendary quest to find the best literary film adaptation of the last 50 years. Given the state of reality, it’s not too surprising that, after th…

After six rounds of voting, and thousands of votes cast, the people have chosen their winner: The Princess Bride, which prevailed over The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King with 60% of the …

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 …

Algebra is an Arabic word. To understand its origin, we must go back to the time and place of the Arabian Nights, during the Islamic Golden Age, when the Islamic Empire was transformed into a milit…

Last year, I put together this list of the most iconic poems in the English language; it’s high time to do the same for short stories. But before we go any further, you may be asking: What do…

I. Reading Inside the shelter’s garden level cafeteria, we sat in a circle. Light from the bright, spring afternoons would beat against the floor, imbuing the space with warmth. I felt nervous. I w…

Lit Hub is excited to feature another entry in a new series from Poets.org: “enjambments,” a monthly interview series with new and established poets. This month, they spoke to Margaret …

1. Once upon a time, around 2014, I began writing What’s Mine. It will be a novel about someone whose home gets invaded by this annoying person, I wrote to my agent. It turns out this annoying pers…

Coconut isn’t just for eating. The immature fruit is a ready source of clean water—long-distance sail ships crossing tropical waters are said to have routinely carried immature coconuts as an emerg…

“No matter whether this treatment is carried out by sorcerers, priests, doctors, or old women, we find examples of the historic ancestry of modern nursing and the earliest forms of the art.” –Lavin…

The film Oppenheimer is approaching a worldwide gross of $1 billion, making it the highest-grossing biographical film on record. It’s a tragic irony that the scientific genius in whose shadow Oppen…

Measurement was a crucial organizing principle in ancient Egypt, but metrology itself does not begin with nilometers. To understand its place in human culture, we have to trace its roots back furth…

This week, 404 Media, which is publishing some really essential writing these days and is well worth your support, featured an excellent piece on the problem librarians are facing as their ebook co…

I’m going to tell you a few things you already know. Every time you open your phone or your computer, your brain is walking onto a battleground. The aggressors are the architects of your digital wo…

«having ADHD in the smartphone era world is much like trying to catch the rain with your hands.»

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways …

Maybe it has happened to you: a stranger catches your eye while you peruse the plant identification section of the library, or wander a mossy hillock speckled with Amanita bisporigera, or shuffle a…

“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do …

I am scared about how fast climate change is disrupting our world. At a theoretical level, I have known for decades about growing carbon dioxide emissions and resultant changes to global and local …