On Writing Darkness and Violence in the Lives of Teenagers
Robin Wasserman: Good morning, Nick! If we were having this conversation in person (and, given your proximity to beignets, I truly wish we were), you’d see that I’m chugging coffee like a maniac. You’d...
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Robert Bresson: ‘I’m not a director. I am a filmmaker.’
The following is from Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983. François-Régis Bastide: Robert Bresson, opening your book almost at random, I landed on this sentence, spoken by Racine to his son...
View ArticleOn the Red Carpet at the National Book Awards
Last Wednesday’s National Book Awards did honor to some of the finest writers in the country, achieving just the right mix of pomp and glamor, thoughtfulness and grace (thanks in no small part to the...
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Indies Recommend: Small Press Books You Should Read This December
As the nation’s only non-profit distributor, Small Press Distribution is dedicated to getting small press literature to the people who want to read it. As such, we’re grateful to our main...
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A Tour of Paris, 1917, With Blaise Cendrars
I first ran across Philippe Soupault’s Lost Profiles as the result of an anecdote related by Roger Shattuck in his marvelous book, The Banquet Years, which explores the origins of the avant-garde in...
View ArticleNtozake Shange: On a Brilliant Balance of Anger and Poetry
Ntozake Shange was honored this year with the Langston Hughes Medal. She was introduced by her longterm editor, Michael Denneny, whose remarks are below. I started working with Zaki in 1975 when I...
View ArticleLove in a Time of Plague: Lessons from the Front Lines of AIDS Activism
Two journalists, who’ve written (respectively) a nonfiction and a fictional saga of 1980s AIDS activism, talk about reviving that seismic moment—and what lessons a digital age can take from it as we...
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What Was the First Book You Fell in Love With?
The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize is awarded to the best debut novel published between January 1st and December 31st of the award year. The author of the winning book is awarded $10,000 and...
View ArticleWriting the Body: Trauma, Illness, Sexuality, and Beyond
In September, Michele Filgate’s quarterly Red Ink Series—focused on women writers, past and present—brought together Eileen Myles, Ruth Ozeki, Porochista Khakpour, Anna March, and Alexandra Kleeman for...
View ArticleAll Writing is a Kind of Exile
On November 8th, the world became narrower. How does this atmosphere bode for literature? The following dialogue between Ilan Stavans and Carlos Fonseca explores the implications on the international...
View ArticleSex, Politics, and Coming of Age in the Clinton Years
To stand in a moment that feels like a transition to a new era—not only does the world bubble with anticipation, but our emotions feel amplified, intense, more closely observed. The time leading to the...
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Ask the Publicists: An Author’s Survival Kit for Dark Times
Q: I’m a member of the alt-right and I’d like to self-publish my memoir. Can you help me? A: Hmmm. By “alt-right” do you mean what we think you mean? Then: Q: Oops I didn’t vote. Can you– A: No. Q:...
View ArticleA Literary Round Table With Michelle Latiolais
Michelle Latiolais is a writer long admired by her peers, but one whose work has yet to find the wider audience it deserves–in part because Latiolais has little time or interest in self-promotion....
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Happy 100th Birthday, Shirley Jackson!
Watch the Creepy 1969 Short Film Adaptation of “The Lottery” Even if you know the story already, the film is unsettling on its own. Shirley Jackson Wasn’t Really a Witch . . . Was She? Jackson...
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4 Writers on the Literary Women Who Most Inspire Them
We are thrilled to be partnering with Words in Solidarity, a new monthly series founded by Kendall Storey and Ben Clague. The series will support institutions that protect lives in this country as...
View ArticleWhy Is it ‘Unrealistic’ to Show Women in Power in Fantasy?
Ken Liu: A lot of fantasy world-building is ostensibly based on historical models. In real history, women exercised power—political, economic, military, artistic, literary, scientific—in both explicit...
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Literary Hub’s Best Books of 2016
Emily Temple, Associate Editor Sudden Death, Álvaro Enrigue, trans. Natasha Wimmer (Riverhead): The best way I can think to describe this novel is as a work of historical absurdism. At its center is a...
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Girls In Trees (In Art, In Literature)
Girls In Trees was inspired by the casual, offhand photos of my daughter taken during summers spent in a Hudson Valley apple orchard. Knees slung over branches, her body became a reversal: head hanging...
View ArticleOn Poverty, Justice, and Writing Sonnets of the South
Melissa Range is the author, most recently, of Scriptorium, a collection that combines Appalachian colloquialisms with reanimated Old English to explore questions of religious and linguistic authority....
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Our Favorite Literary Hub Stories of 2016
Over the course of 2016 we were very proud to publish an average of 30 features a week at Literary Hub. To see the ten most read stories of the year, you can head over here. Below, though, you’ll find...
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