The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

A new indie bookstore named for Octavia Butler is opening in the author's hometown.

Here’s a piece of good literary news to start the year: a new independent bookstore named after the legendary Octavia E. Butler is opening in Pasadena, California, where the late Sci-Fi icon was born and raised. I took the leap Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Here are the books that just entered the public domain.

In 2019, for the first time in over two decades, a new crop of literary work entered the public domain: everything first published in the United States in 1923 became available for reusing, recycling, and remixing. Since then, we’ve had a Read more >

By Emily Temple

Cover reveal: Safiya Sinclair's summer memoir How to Say Babylon

Lit Hub is pleased to share the cover for Safiya Sinclair’s forthcoming memoir, How to Say Babylon, which Simon and Schuster will publish this summer. Sinclair is the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Read more >

By Literary Hub

Are we really going to start disinfecting our used books?

I get that we live in harrowing times, and that global pandemics can leave us feeling powerless and entirely without agency, but taking the time to laboriously disinfect your used books is *not* going to change that—and it might even Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

12 new books to kick off your 2023 reading.

Another year, another batch of new books to look forward to. If any of your resolutions involve reading more, we’ve got you covered. * Deepti Kapoor, Age of Vice (Riverhead) “Riveting … Kapoor paints a mesmerizing picture of violence and Read more >

By Katie Yee

Donna Tartt on the books that were important to her while writing The Secret History.

Donna Tartt’s cozy/murderous winter classic The Secret History, which turned 30 this year, is Today’s December Read With Jenna Pick—and the famously publicity-agnostic Tartt answered a few questions about the book and her experiences over the last 30 years for Read more >

By Emily Temple

Let the opinions commence: You can now read the whole White Noise screenplay.

For those of you anticipating—or dreading—Noah Baumbach’s new adaptation of White Noise, which officially releases on Netflix on December 30th, fun news! You can get a jumpstart and read the screenplay in its entirety, courtesy of Deadline. Tragically, the screenplay does not Read more >

By Eliza Smith

Charles Dickens partied HARD after finishing A Christmas Carol in just six weeks.

Happy Birthday to one of the greatest Christmas stories ever told, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which was published on this date in 1843. Dickens—who, like all writers, needed money at the time—wrote the now-classic parable of avarice and redemption Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Thomas Pynchon’s archives have a home (Oedipa Maas and Zipi Pisk can finally relax)

I have questions. Now that Thomas Pynchon’s archives have a home—at Los Angeles’s Huntington Library—will we finally be given access to how he comes up with the names for his characters? Look, whatever you think of Pynchon as a novelist—and Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Evelyn Waugh's mansion just sold for £3m, but the "superfans" living there refuse to leave.

This week, the eight-bedroom, six-bathroom Cotswold mansion where Evelyn Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited sold to an unnamed bidder in an online auction for £3.16m, after its previous owner, Jason Blain, defaulted on a loan against the property. That’s despite the fact that Read more >

By Emily Temple

Exclusive Cover Reveal: Ice: A Cool History of a Hot Commodity.

Lit Hub is excited to share the cover of Amy Brady’s debut book, ICE: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks—A Cool History of a Hot Commodity, out from Putnam in June 2023. Ice is a captivating cultural history that examines Read more >

By Literary Hub

Exclusive cover reveal: Here's the cover for Edan Lepucki's Time's Mouth

Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Edan Lepucki’s Time’s Mouth forthcoming from Counterpoint in August 2023. From the  bestselling author of California, comes this “enthralling saga about family secrets that grow more powerful with time, set against the magical, Read more >

By Literary Hub

This year's very worst opening sentence is about salami and lingerie.

In 1982, Scott Rice, an English professor at San Jose State University, founded the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest—in which entrants are challenged “to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written”—named, of course, after Edward Bulwer-Lytton, best known Read more >

By Emily Temple

Announcing the winner of the 2022 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.

Literary Hub is pleased to announce the winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, which each year awards $10,000 and publication to a first-time, first-generation immigrant author, alternating yearly between fiction and nonfiction. The 2022 fiction prize Read more >

By Literary Hub

Internet man uses AI to create a children’s book in praise of AI and it is fatuous and ugly.

What the hell are we doing? All the best things are shutting down and people are out here using computers to make children’s books? Not to get too Jeff Goldblum on you, but just because you build a tool to Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Trump is publishing a book of some letters famous people sent him.

In general, I have zero interest in content by and about Trump or his administration, but the latest money grab disguised as a book caught my attention because of the high potential for celebrities being extremely embarrassed. According to CNN, Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor