Literary Hub

A U.K. crafter came under fire this weekend when parents discovered that his handmade hedgehogs had been assembled with pages from an erotic novel. As The Guardian reported, the unidentified hobbyist made his “little creations” from donated books, often to raise money for charity. An apparently friendly sort, the man also liked to hand his paper creatures out to area children. So far, so sweet. But alas, not all hedgehogs are created elegant. On closer inspection, “some parents

Happy (belated) 250th, America! We’re not exactly in the party mood this rainy Monday, but que sera. This weekend brought Washington a militaristic display, and most states a conundrum: how do we celebrate a country that is actively furthering a violent, fascist agenda, in and outside its own borders? To paraphrase Dazed and Confused‘s Ms. Stroud on the day of the bicentennial, we can’t forget what we’ve been asked to celebrate: “the fact that a bunch of slave-ownin

TODAY: In 1893, Guy de Maupassant dies. Michael Dirda makes the case for Moby-Dick as the ultimate American novel. | Lit Hub Criticism Why the “legendary” dinner party from Plato’s Symposium is actually about love. | Lit Hub Craft How medieval scribes engaged in writing as a spiritual practice (and preserved culture and history in the process). | Lit Hub History On the unexpected gift of sharing a geriatric debut: “When my manuscript wasn’t chosen as the winner, I had a sinki

Near the beginning of his long narrative poem “Letter to Lord Byron,” W. H. Auden writes, “I want a form that’s large enough to swim in.” So too, apparently, did Herman Melville for his sixth book, when the thirty-year-old author decided to enlarge and deepen a relatively straight-forward nautical adventure story, somewhat in the vein of his first and greatest success, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), and make it…what exactly? Many readers today regard Moby-

The yodel: the perfect acknowledgment of that which cannot be hidden anymore and therefore also that which we have always had to hide. The yodel: the flickering Adam’s apple. Not unlike a sound we sometimes ever inadvertently make, a kind of croaking sound, a sound that is not so much even made as it is emitted and then immediately and often embarrassingly, very forgivably, try to cover up, with a faked cough or a clearing of the throat. But that is it: the yodel must be forgiven. And the yodel

I have been obsessed with dinner parties since I was eight or nine. At this age my greatest desire was to get my mum to let me stay up for the ones she threw for her friends. Once I even succeeded. It was amazing. and yes; it involved a hostess trolley. As an adult I have therefore made it a priority in my life to throw a lot of dinner parties. The problem with dinner parties, from the point of view of a hostess, is that so much is always going on and once and you can only be in one place at a t

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. On July 8, 1918, just two weeks shy of his 19th birthday, American Red Cross volunteer Ernest Hemingway was struck by an Austrian mortar shell while delivering chocolate to soldiers on the Italian front. The shell landed about three feet from the teenage Hemingway, knocking him out and filling his legs with shrapnel. An Italian soldier standing between him and the blast was killed; another lost both legs in the explosion

At the 2026 Venice Biennale, artists and writers converged on Yto Barrada’s exhibition at the French Pavillion to pay tribute to Lebanese-American artist Etel Adnan. A stalwart polymath working across poetry, prose, and visual art, Adnan’s practice featured themes of dispersal, indeterminacy and relation. Since her passing in November 2021, at 96 years old, the reverberation of her work’s impact has only grown. There in Venice, French fashion designer Michelle Lamy read an excerpt of Adnan

If I were 26 years old, full of piss and vinegar and had a debut poetry collection, I’d fancy myself a modern-day troubadour. I’d live out of my car, which would likely be a beat-up Volvo station wagon, with a COEXIST bumper sticker slapped across the back windshield. I’d inflict my poems on both suspecting and unsuspecting audiences, roaming from town to town, taking the stage at whatever coffee shops would have me. I’d wow the crowds that would number anywhere from two to twenty-two with my fu

Because monastic life depended on books, it was natural that monks and nuns came to produce them. Many monasteries included a scriptorium, a dedicated writing room where books were meticulously copied by hand. In Northern Europe, the scriptorium was often located next to the calefactorium (warming room), where a fire was kept alive, allowing scribes to step in and warm themselves when needed. Most of these books were for the monastery’s own use, though some monasteries produced codices for sale.

Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association. Compiled, designed, and distributed by The Independent Publishers Caucus. * 1. The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett (Spiegel & Grau) 2. Harvest Season (The Seasons of Carnage Trilogy #2) by Brynne Weaver (Slowburn) 3. John of John by Douglas Stuart (Grove Press) 4. I Who Have Never Known Men by Ja

Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for nonfiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association. Compiled, designed, and distributed by The Independent Publishers Caucus. * 1. The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss by Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris (W. W. Norton) 2. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (M

Isabel Waidner’s As If, Danielle Allen’s Radical Duke, and Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * Fiction 1. As If by Isabel Waidner (FSG) 4 Rave • 4 Positive “Grief is the engine of this surreal caper … The novel’s alternating narrators keep things moving briskly, the limited perspective of one chapter delivering the comic payoff of the next … Amid the dizzying back-and-f

Well, hello there! Fancy meeting you here. Welcome back to the Internet’s favorite drunken advice column, Am I The Literary Asshole? It’s the place where we ponder all of life’s hardest-hitting questions, such as “Why does my dog walk out of the room every time I read my work aloud?” and “If a blurb falls in the forest and no one’s around to read it does it still say searing and compelling?” I’m your host, Kristen Arnett, and I just got back from a week of teaching at Kenyon Writers Workshop. I’

June 1982 The triplet of knocks came from the front door just as Sylvia Upshaw and her two children were putting on their shoes, about to walk over to Mrs. Talbot’s house. Syl’s daughter, GiGi, her first-born, peered through the living room window, which looked out onto their small front lawn. “It’s the Whites,” she said. “The Whites? James and Ella White?” Syl asked. A sudden pang of fear fluttered in her stomach. Then Syl’s son, RJ, had a look. “What the—” RJ said, his eyes fixed on their unex

Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Hannah Gold on Missouri Williams’s The Vivisectors, Rand Richards Cooper on Joyce Carol Oates’s The Frenzy, Jenessa Abrams on Emily LaBarge’s Dog Days, Lauretta Charlton on Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor’s Something We Said, and Joanna Biggs on Makenna Goodman’s Helen of Nowhere. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * “Could the character of Agathe be intended as satirical? A sly sendup of a power-trip

TODAY: In 1982, Djuna Barnes dies.  Through layers of loss and sorrow, Fatemeh Shams remembers Marjane Satrapi: “Marjane reminded me, as her work often does, that in the bleakest times, art, writing, and human connection are radical acts of repair.”| Lit Hub Deb Olin Unferth explores the necessity of writing speculative fiction in this time and place. | Lit Hub Craft Brad Gooch chronicles the surreal passage of time in suburban America. | Lit Hub Memoir “Whether looming in dar

On Thursday morning, June 4, I woke to the tragic and shocking news of Marjane Satrapi’s death. It was not the first time I had learned of a loved one’s loss in exile in the most mundane, alienating way: half-awake in bed, phone in hand, scrolling through messages and headlines, confronted by yet another immeasurable catastrophe. The news of my father’s passing reached me in a similar way seven months ago. Suddenly, everything felt darker, more fragile than it had the day before. I sat in my Phi

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Most of my books have elements of surrealism or sci-fi or the fantastic—the passenger pigeons mysteriously return, or a character has the power of knowing when people will die—but I really committed in my last book, the eco-fiction heist Barn 8, when I swerved twenty thousand years ahead into an apocalyptic tomorrow. It felt so right that I knew that in my next book the future would be my journey. From the first sentence

There’s a popular idea, fueled by countless Hollywood movies, of how writing a novel works. It goes something like this. Author is struck by inspiration. Author sits down and types in a frenzied montage, words flowing directly from the ether onto the page. Within a few hours/days/weeks, a book appears. I used to think this was (charitably) an exaggeration, or (uncharitably) bullshit. My experience of the writing process always involved much more conscious effort, and much more uncertainty. I spe