Salman Rushdie on Poetry, Being a Reader, and Going to the Movies
In part two of their conversation, Salman Rushdie and Paul Holdengraber discuss Christopher Hitchens’s prodigious memory, V.S. Naipaul’s self regard, and the joy of going to the movies. Listen to part...
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The O. Henry Prizes: Read Six Of the Year’s Best Stories
Ottessa Moshfegh: “Clark was the one to introduce me to the submarine-sandwich diet and to the zombies at the bus depot.” Asako Serizawa: “I believe few of us forget what we keep hidden in our...
View ArticleAnnouncing the 2016 O. Henry Prize Stories
We are very happy to announce the O. Henry Prize Stories for 2016, edited by Laura Furman, which will appear in an eponymous anthology this September, from Anchor. Read selected stories here: “Irises”...
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Celebrating Translation Month
Infinite Jest Around the World: Translating David Foster Wallace’s mega-novel “Released in the States in 1996, it has in 20 years been translated into just five languages.” * Do Americans Hate Foreign...
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Everything is Teeth
From EVERYTHING IS TEETH. Used with permission of Pantheon. Text copyright © 2016 by Evie Wyld. Illustration copyright © 2016 by Joe Sumner.
View ArticleAlain de Botton on the False Promises of Romantic Love
In part one of their conversation, Alain de Botton and Paul Holdengraber discuss everything from David Hume to the false promises of Romantic love (but mainly the love stuff…). Alain de Botton on...
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13 Books You Should Read This June
Grace, Natashia Deon (Counterpoint) Grace, by Natashia Deon, begins in the 1840s South, when 15-year-old Naomi runs away from the plantation where she was born and ends up in a Georgia brothel....
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The First Science Fiction Novel?
John Crowley, perhaps best known for his novel Little, Big, used all the available English translations and worked with a German scholar to produce a new edition of The Chemical Wedding, an allegorical...
View ArticleSeven Ways to Hand-sell a Lost Modern Masterpiece
If there is such a thing as a writer’s writer, and a poet’s poet, then Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai is a bookseller’s book. Originally published by the ill-fated Miramax Books in 2000, DeWitt’s epic...
View ArticleOn Writing Islamic Identity and Being Labeled a Political Writer
Any contemporary novelist who takes on themes of Islamic identity and jihad in their work risks being labeled a political writer. But for Elnathan John, a debut novelist from Nigeria, and Leila...
View ArticleIntroducing Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes” for Books
We’re very happy today to announce a new Lit Hub project—Book Marks (you can see it for yourself, right here). To paraphrase the press release (which is available in full here): Book Marks will...
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Alain de Botton on Voltaire, Twitter, and Commercial Culture
In part two of their conversation Alain de Botton and Paul Holdengraber discuss the cultural critic as excavator of ideas, how the French do it better, and the addictive nature of Twitter. Listen to...
View ArticleMax Porter and Catherine Lacey Discuss Death, Writing, and Musical Theater
Max Porter’s debut, Grief is the Thing With Feathers (Graywolf Press), a work that exists in a liminal space between poetry and fiction, is as gorgeous as it is singular. I read it in a single sitting...
View ArticleEvoking Illness in Fiction and Nonfiction
In honor of the Pulitzer Prize centennial celebrations, Paul Harding, author of Tinkers (2010 winner for Fiction), and David Oshinsky, author of Polio: An American Story (2006 winner for History), sat...
View ArticleLaurie Anderson on Childhood, Storytelling, and Hiding in Plain Sight
Laurie Anderson talks to Paul Holdengraber about art, virtual reality, and telling jokes on stage. (And more.) Laurie Anderson on hiding in plain sight… I never didn’t use a microphone. I always used a...
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Bringing Frankenstein Back to Life, 200 Years Later
The scientist Hippolyte Cloquet described writing his groundbreaking Treatise on Descriptive Anatomy “with scalpel in hand,” which was also the case with Mary Shelley’s writing of Frankenstein,...
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Seven Writers On Fathers and Fatherhood
Gretchen Marquette on the unexpected poetry of her father’s life as a cop. “Drugs allow you to simulate leaving.” Christy Wampole on fathers and addiction. Patrick Ryan remembers the last book his...
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Do Writers Need To Be Alone to Thrive?
Last month, a standing-room only crowd gathered at Brooklyn’s BookCourt for the inaugural installment of Michele Filgate’s quarterly Red Ink Series, focused on women writers, past and present.”Finding...
View ArticleThe Seven Stages of Love, According to French Poetry
Love, of course, is a fantasy. And the French in particular make a point of maintaining and analyzing this fantasy, from Abbé Prévost’s eighteenth-century novel of love-drunk obsession to Amélie’s...
View ArticleDead Dogs, Evil Eyes, and Writing the Ugly
Isn’t it illuminating to read someone’s personal interpretations of the goings-on in their life? Stacy Szymaszek’s Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals shies away from nothing, an active text...
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