The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

Want to be a bookseller? This chicken-coop-turned-bookstore is up for grabs.

Big news for booksellers, or even aspiring booksellers: The Times Union has reported that Owl Pen Books, a bookstore nestled in the hills of Washington County, is for sale, along with its 40,000 titles. As perhaps hinted by its location, Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Every book featured in HBO's hit satire The White Lotus.

On Sunday the 15th, the season one finale of HBO’s comedy-drama The White Lotus aired. The six-episode series, helmed by showrunner Mike White (Enlightened), chronicles a week in the life of a group of guests and staff at a tropical resort Read more >

By Vanessa Willoughby

This new children’s literature museum is inspired by Kiki’s Delivery Service.

Calling all Miyazaki fans: a new hilltop children’s literature museum in Edogawa City, designed by Kengo Kuma and Associates, is inspired by the works of Eiko Kadono, the author of Kiki’s Delivery Service (known to many as the source material Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Read a previously unpublished Ursula K. Le Guin poem.

Here’s some relaxing reading for this Friday afternoon: in an online feature in TriQuarterly Mag, writer Jacqueline Dougan Jackson recalls her experience meeting Ursula K. Le Guin when Le Guin came to teach at Beloit University, involving a humorous prank Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Here are the best reviewed books of the week.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Velvet Was the Night, Jaime Cortez’s Gordo, Billie Jean King’s All In, and Frances Wilson’s Burning Man all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for Read more >

By Book Marks

Federico García Lorca predicted his own death in a poem.

Eighty-five years ago today, on August 19th, 1936, Federico García Lorca—the Spanish avant-garde poet, playwright, and ardent socialist—was shot and killed by Nationalist militia before being buried in an unmarked mass grave somewhere outside Granada, where he remains to this day. Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

What to read next based on your quarantine hobby.

Remember the beginning of quarantine, when everyone wanted to make sourdough but there was no flour to be found anywhere? What hobby did you pick up to pass the time? Personally, I was super committed to learning French on Duolingo Read more >

By Katie Yee

Walter Mosley is writing a new The Thing series for Marvel.

Another acclaimed novelist is getting into the Marvel business. Like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Benjamin Percy before him, Walter Mosley, who is primarily known for his mystery and crime fiction but who has written across multiple genres, including science fiction and Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

The new Foundation trailer is serving epic fashion and a power-hungry Lee Pace.

If you’ve been waiting for a new trailer for the highly anticipated adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, you’re in luck. The official Apple TV+ trailer, which dropped today, features Jared Harris as Dr. Hari Seldon and Lee Pace as Read more >

By Vanessa Willoughby

The Satanic Temple is awarding scholarships to “devil’s advocates.”

The Satanic Temple—whose function should be obvious from its name, but in case you need an explainer, it’s a religious organization that “encourage[s] benevolence and empathy, reject[s] tyrannical authority, advocate[s] practical common sense, oppose[s] injustice, and undertake[s] noble pursuits”—has a Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Two members of PEN International have been murdered by the Taliban.

In a statement on Tuesday, PEN America called for the United States to act swiftly to offer protection to writers, journalists, and cultural figures in Afghanistan—as they face immediate danger from the Taliban, which is quickly overtaking the country. Earlier Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Who should star in the new TV adaptation of The English Patient?

There are people (cowards, philistines, general haters) who now roll their eyes when I talk about how much I love The English Patient—Anthony Minghella’s lush, multi-Oscar-winning 1996 adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning 1992 novel. They think it’s overlong, painfully Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

About the time I called Frank McCourt to tell him how much I loved Angela's Ashes.

Writers on Twitter will sometimes tweet something about how nice it is to get in touch with an author whose work you love to tell them so. I do this only rarely, both because I try to avoid Twitter in Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Read an excerpt from a brand new biography of Octavia Butler.

Today, i09 shared an excerpt from Star Child: A Biographical Constellation of Octavia Estelle Butler, a biography of the legendary SF author for young readers, told in verse and prose by Ibi Zoboi, who was one of Butler’s students at Read more >

By Emily Temple

Exclusive cover reveal: Richie Hofmann's A Hundred Lovers.

Literary Hub is pleased to share the book cover for Richie Hofmann’s latest poetry collection, A Hundred Lovers, which will be published by Knopf in February 2022. The publisher describes the book like this: A Hundred Lovers is a catalog Read more >

By Literary Hub

Here's a video of Nabokov stalking butterflies, reading Lolita, and trashing Faulkner.

Sixty-three years ago today, Lolita—Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous “Charles Atlas muscle-man of language“—first hit shelves in the US. While we try our best not to condone or endorse pedophilia here at Lit Hub, we are all of us pretty vocal Lolita fans. In fact, we’ve Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Why is Noah Baumbach's adaptation of White Noise called . . . Wheat Germ?

Today I learned that Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 cult classic White Noise, which is currently filming in Cleveland, is, according to Stereogum, “tentatively titled Wheat Germ.” Um, what? Is this a good name for a movie about Read more >

By Emily Temple

12 new opinions on Lolita that no one’s invented yet.

Today marks the 63rd anniversary of Lolita’s publication in the United States, and for those 63 years, readers have been having similar conversations about the novel: about its prose and its morality. These knotty topics are worth discussing—but it’s 2021, Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Two Brooklyn locations of Greenlight Bookstore have unionized.

Good news: Publishers Weekly has reported that a total of 39 employees at two Greenlight Bookstore locations and one Yours Truly, Brooklyn (Greenlight’s sister stationary store) location have voted to join the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union. Greenlight Bookstore Read more >

By Walker Caplan

The common denominator of the universe is still chaos, but Werner Herzog has two new books coming.

Get ready for some excellent longform profiles, because everyone’s favorite filmmaker/delightfully bananas quote machine Werner Herzog is coming out with two books. The first, The Twilight World, is a nonfiction book about Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda, who refused to surrender Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor