Junot Diaz on the Joys of the Young and the Stories of the Dead
In this episode of A Phone Call From Paul, Junot Diaz talks to Paul Holdengraber about death, pain, the joys of teaching, and the magic of the library. Junot Diaz on the joy of teaching young people…...
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Thomas Bernhard: “I Am a Story Destroyer”
Over the course of three days, June 5, 6, and 7 in 1970, simply sitting on a white bench in a Hamburg park, Thomas Bernhard delivered a powerful monologue for Three Days (Drei Tage), filmmaker Ferry...
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There Are 1,462 Possible Plots for Your Book
In the 1920s, dime store novelist William Wallace Cook painstakingly diagrammed and cataloged his personal writing method—“Purpose, opposed by Obstacle, yields Conflict”—for the instruction and...
View ArticleWriting Infertility: Belle Boggs and Monica Youn in Conversation
Monica Youn is the author of two previous poetry collections, Barter and Ignatz, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. A former lawyer, she teaches at Princeton University and in the MFA...
View ArticleToni Morrison on Reality TV, Black Lives Matter, and Meeting Jeff Bezos
In an exclusive interview with Natur & Kulturs Litterära Revy, Ms. Morrison talks with Nadifa Mohamed about literature, police brutality and Kanye West’s birthday presents. This is an excerpt from...
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16 Books You Should Read This November
Swing Time, Zadie Smith (Penguin Press) I cannot wait to re-enter Zadie Smith’s world of frenetic words and perfect sentences, the energetic ride you take the second you start reading her. Smith’s...
View ArticleFanny Howe on Race, Family, and the Line Between Fiction and Poetry
To begin the interview that follows, I came up from Brooklyn, where after 50 years in Boston I now live, to Cambridge, meeting Fanny Howe at her apartment building off Cambridge Common. After teaching...
View ArticleFor Better or Worse, How Mississippi Remembers Emmett Till
“The past is never dead.” William Faulkner’s incisive observation is invoked so frequently when talking about the American South that it now induces a groan. But Faulkner’s conjoined observation takes...
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Kafka on Clothes, Laughter, and Miserable Words
WORDS ARE MISERABLE MINERS OF MEANING (to Selma K.) How many words grace the pages of this book! They are supposed to bestir memory. As if words could remember! For words are miserable mountain...
View ArticlePoetryFest Presents Work by Jericho Brown, Fanny Howe, and Jana Prikryl
This weekend, Lit Hub is co-presenting Irish Arts Center’s eighth annual #PoetryFest, which showcases top poets from Ireland and the U.S over three days of readings, conversations, signings and...
View ArticleIsaac Mizrahi on a Love of Old Things, and Surviving the Nightmare of the...
Paul Holdengraber talks to Isaac Mizrahi about storytelling, looking back at life, and the joys of art. Isaac Mizrahi on a taste for old things… New things can be old. I prefer old things because...
View ArticleAmber Tamblyn Reads from Alice Hoffman’s Faithful
In February, when the snow comes down hard, little globes of light are left along Route 110, on the side of the road that slopes off when a driver least expects it. The lights are candles set inside...
View ArticleOur Kids, Their Fears, Our President?
Writers Mira Jacob and Emily Raboteau conducted this conversation via email during the week before the election, at night after getting their kids to bed. Emily Raboteau: Mira, Lit Hub has invited us...
View ArticleSatire, Despair, and Art in the Age of Trump
We asked writers Kera Bolonik and Kate Tuttle to talk about the increasing difficulty of satire in the age of Donald Trump. Happily, they touched on that, and so much more of what’s facing America,...
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The Beginning or the End? Writers on the Age of Trump
Writing is a political act. The idea that literature can (or should) be considered wholly separate from earthly concerns of justice and suffering diminishes both art and the life it depicts. If the...
View ArticleDubravka Ugrešić: “Who am I, Where am I, and Whose am I?”
Ugrešić delivered the following comments upon receiving the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature on Friday, October 28, at the University of Oklahoma. She will be the focus of a cover...
View ArticleThe Very Real Consolations of Poetry
In dark times, people often turn to poetry to help them survive despair (or more specifically, as W.S. Merwin would suggest, “Read poems, not poetry.”) Poetry is not a substitute for action, but it can...
View ArticleA 90-Year-Old John Berger is Not Surprised By President Trump
John Berger talks with Paul Holdengraber about President Donald Trump, the emptiness of American political commentary, desire, place, and how the hell to keep going. John Berger on Trump’s win… In...
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25 Nonfiction Books for Anger and Action
Shortly before his execution in 1915, activist and songwriter Joe Hill sent a telegram to Bill Haywood that read, in part, “Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize!” It’s an oft-repeated phrase that’s...
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50 Necessary Books for Your Anger and Your Action
25 Books: Fiction and Poetry From George Orwell to Margaret Atwood to Maya Angelou, fiction and poetry to inspire, scare, motivate, and help you through the coming struggle. 25 Books: Non-Fiction From...
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