The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

Megan Marshall has won this year's BIO Award.

Last week, the Biographers International Organization (BIO) announced Megan Marshall as the winner of its 13th annual BIO Award, bestowed annually “to a distinguished colleague who has made major contributions to the advancement of the art and craft of biography.” Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Turns out the amateur rapper who laundered billions in crypto also dissed Jane Austen.

If you’re paying attention to crypto developments—or just strange, strange news items—you may be passingly familiar with Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, the couple accused of laundering billions of dollars in bitcoin. The details of the case are worth reading—not Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Want an app to read you the Canterbury Tales in Middle English? You’re in luck.

If you ever took an English class where you read the Canterbury Tales, there’s a strong likelihood you had to perform the opening in Middle English, using pronunciation guides or YouTube videos (depending on the year) to guide you. Now, Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Announcing the sixth annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize.

Literary Hub is pleased to announce that submissions are now open for the sixth annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize, which awards $1000 for an outstanding book collection conceived and built by a young woman+, aged 30 or younger, Read more >

By Literary Hub

Read the loveliest moons in literature, in honor of today’s Snow Moon.

Last night, the moon graced us with her luminous presence at a very special point in her journey. Sure, we get a full moon every ~30 days, but February brings us the Snow Moon (also called the Storm Moon, the Read more >

By Katie Yee

Read President Obama’s citation of Maya Angelou when awarding her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Yesterday in 2010, President Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Maya Angelou, titanic writer, performer, activist, and “spokesperson for . . . all people who are committed to raising the moral standards of living in the United States.” Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Jack Kerouac fetishized the white working class almost as much as a NY Times reporter.

In February, 1949 a 26-year-old Jack Kerouac found himself stuck in a blizzard in Dickinson, North Dakota. At the time, of course, Kerouac was in the middle of the long, slow cross-country trip that would become his canonical novel, On Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Here are Haruki Murakami’s five favorite books.

If you’ve already seen Drive My Car, purchased a Haruki Murakami/Uniqlo collab T-shirt, taken a video tour of the Haruki Murakami Library, read Murakami’s take on his female characters, and learned to compare the process of writing to . . Read more >

By 141 Writers

Use these eye drops instead of reading glasses to finally finish Proust.

Look, we all get old, you can’t really fight it. But if you’ve been putting off the inevitable purchase of drugstore reading glasses because of a little vanity, well, I don’t blame you, and maybe you can put it off Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Here is Ottessa Moshfegh walking in a fashion show.

This morning, I learned that we were, at this very moment, in the middle of New York Fashion Week. Because Lit Hub’s invitations to fashion shows keep getting lost in the mail, I had no plans to cover the festivities Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

15 new books to love this week.

You know what a really good activity for February 15th is? Going to the closest CVS, getting your hands on all the discount Valentine’s Day chocolate there is, and then hopping over to your favorite bookstore to pick up a Read more >

By Katie Yee

A brief history of heart-shaped books.

Lit Hub wants to wish you a very happy Valentine’s Day—and I’m celebrating by taking a look back at one of my treasured images, that of the heart-shaped book. We don’t see heart-shaped books in the wild anymore, but for Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Free Maus? Digital access to banned books is important but writers still need to eat!

In another case of unbridled tech utopianism, the director of the Internet Archive—a non-profit website that makes ebooks freely available to anyone with the internet—is complaining that Penguin Random House wants them to remove Art Spiegelman’s Maus from their collection, Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Let's take a tour of Salman Rushdie's IMDb page.

Has any contemporary author played versions of themselves in more movies than Salman Rushdie? (This is a rhetorical question; please do not email me.) As a repeat (and repeat, and repeat) viewer of the all-time great rom-com Bridget Jones’s Diary, I Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Do you want to learn more about Iris Murdoch’s beermat collection?

It’s no great secret that Iris Murdoch loved a drink (and I’m not just talking about a wee sweet sherry on Boxing Day). And as someone who loved a drink, it makes an awful lot of sense she loved pubs. Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

5 fictional female friendships to revisit this Galentine's Day.

I sincerely hope you have fun brunch plans this weekend because Sunday is Galentine’s Day! In case you haven’t seen Parks and Recreation in a while (reasonable, since they took it off Netflix a while back) here’s a refresher: according to Read more >

By Katie Yee

8 books to help you through these last cold days of winter.

At this point in the year, you may be itching for spring—but it’s still February and there’s still some cold for us to endure. But no matter what it may feel like when you put your foot in a snowbank, Read more >

By Snigdha Koirala

You can’t steal from a little free library, but can you censor it?

We once again have to point out that you cannot actually “steal” from a little free library. And you should definitely not get the cops involved if you think someone is “stealing” the explicitly free things you’ve put out. Little Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Preview a new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion soundtracked by Cardi B and Dua Lipa.

Here’s something to tide you over while you wait for the Dakota Johnson-helmed Persuasion Netflix adaptation: this month, a musical adaptation of Persuasion begins its run at Kingston’s Rose Theatre. Adapted by Jeff James and James Yeatman, the adaptation’s soundtrack Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Take a look at this gorgeous, see-through “book house.”

Because you can never have enough gorgeous libraries to imagine yourself visiting: Condition_Lab’s new Pingtan Book House library in Pingtan, China, built by working closely with local carpenters and CUHK architecture students, is a luminous, organic structure with a matrix Read more >

By Walker Caplan