The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

Here are the greatest mustaches in the history of (literary) film and TV.

Earlier this week, Ewan McGregor was photographed in Bolton on the set of A Gentleman in Moscow, Paramount+’s upcoming limited series adaptation of Amor Towles’ mega-bestselling 2016 novel. McGregor plays the titular gentleman, Count Alexander Rostov, who, in in the aftermath of the Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Who will buy this little Welsh bookshop, which comes complete with hundreds of books?

Attention book lovers yearning to get out of Dodge: a down-on-its-luck bookstore in the Welsh mining town of Blaenavon (population 6,055) is headed to (online) auction next week, with bidding to open at the low low price of £72,000. Sure, Read more >

By Emily Temple

And the winners of books most left behind in Scottish hotels in 2022 are...

Travelodge has released some new house-keeping data on the books most often left behind at its hotels in Scotland, and no, “the bible,” doesn’t top the list. Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing is high on the list of forgotten Read more >

By Janet Manley

Exclusive cover reveal: See the cover for Nick McDonell's Quiet Street.

Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Quiet Street: On American Privilege by Nick McDonell, which will be published by Pantheon this August. Here’s some background about the book from the publisher: Growing up on New York City’s Upper Read more >

By Literary Hub

Judy Blume asks that you stop being so weird about what your kid reads.

The new celebrity vodka is a celebrity-owned bookshop, I think. Take it from Judy Blume, who owns and runs Books & Books with her husband in Key West, and has thus been granted a birds’ eye view of our consumption Read more >

By Janet Manley

The best and worst reasons to be an English major.

We English majors are not even dead and The New Yorker has moved to bury us. Nathan Heller reports in a new article that enrollment in English programs has dropped precipitously at universities across the nation as people pursue STEM Read more >

By Janet Manley

TikTok has awoken and found itself with a mad crush on Kafka.

Oh to be the daughter of a dental surgeon in 20th century Prague! Like circus-goers marveling at a heap of bones in the straw, TikTokkers have been come upon the mortified works of Franz Kafka and found themselves overcome with Read more >

By Janet Manley

Reading Ron DeSantis’s dull ChatBot prose for the MAGA speak it really is.

In a surprise to no one, aspiring presidential strong man and virtuosically charmless MAGA suit-stay Ron DeSantis has written a bland and charmless campaign memoir, out today. Early reports indicate that The Courage to Be Free (lol) is that most Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Exclusive cover reveal: See the cover for Athena Dixon's The Loneliness Files.

Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Athena Dixon’s memoir in essays The Loneliness Files, forthcoming from Tin House this fall. Here’s a bit about the book from the publisher: In Spring 2020, the world as we knew Read more >

By Literary Hub

11 new books to read right now.

We’re getting out of the winter blues, you guys! The sun is setting later and later, and you know what that means: more daylight hours for reading books. * Priya Guns, Your Driver Is Waiting (Doubleday) “A retelling of the Read more >

By Katie Yee

If you quote a Dickens character in a piece on weight loss drugs, don’t pick one who starves kids?

Sigh. Let’s dig in. At 8:00 a.m. EST, The Cut published the online version of New York Magazine‘s newest print cover story, a longform reported piece from Matthew Schneier called “Life After Food,” about a new weight-loss fad involving the Read more >

By Olivia Rutigliano

The Kirk Cameron-drag queen story hour cage match is officially on.

Children: choose your fighter. In the red corner: evangelist actor, “loving husband,” and new children’s book author Kirk Cameron, who had a crowd of “hundreds” at his Christian-themed children’s book reading in Hendersonville, Tennessee, over the weekend, after conceiving of Read more >

By Janet Manley

Cover Reveal: See the cover for Farah Ali's The River, The Town.

Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Farah Ali’s debut novel, The River, The Town, which publishes in October 2023 from Dzanc Books. Here’s some more about the book from the publisher: In the rural town in Pakistan Read more >

By Literary Hub

You're a bestselling author, but do you have your own NFTs? Neal Stephenson has a new flex.

Want a post-apocalyptic dystopia? I’ll give you a post-apocalyptic dystopia, said novelist Neal Stephenson, who has jumped into the NFT game with some glitchy Y2K-looking art. Stephenson authored the Y2K classic Snow Crash, a story credited with “predicting” the metaverse, Read more >

By Janet Manley

Hell yeah, Michael Imperioli reads Eileen Myles.

Celebrities with good taste in literature: you truly love to see it. This week Michael Imperioli (of The Sopranos, and White Lotus, and also the stupidly under-watched, hysterical This Fool fame), posted a cool literary selfie, with the caption: “the Read more >

By Emily Temple

Could a billionaire’s child get these infamous fictional boxes made?

This morning, apropos of nothing, I got to thinking about boxes. More specifically, I got to thinking about some of my favorite fictional boxes. Why, I wondered, in a country so full of industrious billionaires and their plucky, disruptor offspring, Read more >

By Dan Sheehan