In exhibit #3,767 of ginned-up cancel culture panic, The Daily Mail is reporting that Stirling University in Scotland… …has removed Jane Austen [from a literature course] to help “decolonise the curriculum” and “contribute increased diversity” on the syllabus. Stirling University’s Read more >
Lit Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Silas House’s latest novel Lark Ascending, which will be published by Algonquin in September. Algonquin describes Lark Ascending as “a riveting story of survival and hope” for readers of Station Eleven, Migrations, and Read more >
Tonight, in a ceremony at the New York Historical Society hosted by Maggie Nelson, the Whiting Foundation announced the ten new Whiting Award winners, an award “designed to recognize excellence and promise in a spectrum of emerging talent.” The award Read more >
Rabih Alameddine has won this year’s PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his novel, The Wrong End of the Telescope. The novel was selected by judges Eugenia Kim, Rebecca Makkai, and Rion Amilcar Scott. It stood out among the 500 eligible novels Read more >
Charles Dickens loved magic acts. He loved them. This should come as no surprise to those who know about his tendencies for showmanship—his highly theatrical public readings of selections from his novels or his collaborating on various plays and performances. Read more >
In an Instagram post yesterday, Britney Spears spared a few words about her memoir-in-progress (snapped up by Simon & Schuster in February for somewhere in the region of $15 million). The post has since been deleted (intrigue!), but fortunately the Read more >
The climate crisis? Iron Man is on it. In between takes of his Marvel blockbusters, Robert Downey Jr., as it turns out, has cultivated an interest in nutrition and its implications for a person’s climate footprint. He’s partnering with Thomas Read more >
Huh. Imagine that. A few years after Nancy Crampton Brophy—a self-published romance novelist—wrote an essay called “How to Murder Your Husband,” her husband was found shot to death in his classroom at the Oregon Culinary Institute in Portland. While that Read more >
Perhaps in a move to render all other uses of the word Orwellian laughable by comparison, Amazon is planning to ban a list of words including “union,” “ethics,” “plantation,” “harassment,” “concerned,” “pay raise,” and “restrooms” from an internal chat app Read more >
It’s a BIG WEEK, folks! New titles from Emily St. John Mandel, Douglas Stuart, Jennifer Egan, Ocean Vuong, Samantha Hunt, and more are hitting shelves today. Prepare your minds, hearts, and wallets. * Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility Read more >
I am not generally a fan of awards shows (I don’t want to go to someone else’s work banquet, sorry!), so I didn’t tune in for last night’s Grammys. This morning, though, I was delighted to see that Ukrainian poet Read more >
According to this breathlessly unhinged story in Woman & Home, Adele bought some books in February. STOP THE PRESSES. But ok, yes, we here at Lit Hub are sadly prone to unseemly excitement when any non-literary celebrity shows the slightest Read more >
Huge news from Staten Island today: employees who work at the Amazon facility located there just voted in favor of unionizing, the first in the company to do so, in a huge win for labor organizers in the US. Employees Read more >
Yesterday, on late poet and memoirist Molly Brodak’s 42nd birthday, a new nonprofit formed in her memory launched. Glass Orchid is an organization committed to supporting independent artists, writers, publishers, and alternative spaces; they provide grant opportunities, financial support and Read more >
Swansea University has announced its shortlist for the 2022 Dylan Thomas Prize. The £20,000 prize celebrates work written in the English language across the world by authors aged 39 or under, and this year, the shortlist includes three debuts. The Read more >
Old Lion Publishing, a book publisher based in Lviv, Ukraine, has created a campaign to collect funds for books that they will distribute among Ukrainian children who are living as refugees. More than four million Ukrainians have fled the country Read more >
Putting all overachieving kids to shame forever, Charlotte Brontë and her siblings created a series of tiny books when they were children that have since become highly coveted—and very expensive—objects in the world of antiquarian book collection. Though many of Read more >
New hero alert: Wong May, the winner of this year’s $165,000 Windham-Campbell Prize in poetry, who expressed surprise at the award given than she has consciously eschewed the literary world in favor of the work itself. On the Windham-Campbell website, Read more >
A small mystery: last week, writers on Twitter discovered that many LGBTQ+ books were been missing from Target’s website after previously being listed on the site for pre-order. In his Twitter thread, debut author Brian D. Kennedy (author of A Read more >
You, avid reader of this site, obviously know how obsessed we are with Taylor Swift. We have dedicated a fair amount of time to recommending books and writers based off your favorite album by her. After all, she’s the perfect Read more >
