The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

Attention internet, J.D. Vance has Complaints about the Gossip Girl reboot.

Actually . . . you don’t have to pay attention to this. But since you’re here, J.D. Vance, of Hillbilly Elegy fame, is upset that HBO is about to ruin Gossip Girl for him. Wokeness will make everything boring and ugly. https://t.co/u6bIgS12Rh — Read more >

By Emily Temple

Lessons of a self-published writer: independent bookstores are good, Amazon not so much.

In 2019, self-published novelist Mason Engel set out to promote his novel by visiting 50 bookstores in 50 days, heading across America to spread the good word, filming it as he went. At that point, he’d still planned to just Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Remember when Jonathan Franzen was on Jeopardy!?

Like many other people on Literary Twitter and also in the General Media, I have recently received an advance copy of Jonathan Franzen’s next novel, Crossroads. I have not yet begun to read it, though I will, and not, like Read more >

By Emily Temple

Brontë enthusiasts have banded together to stop Sotheby’s from auctioning off rare manuscripts.

Last month, Sotheby’s announced that a collection of rare Brontë-affiliated manuscripts, most notably a volume of 31 handwritten poems by Emily Brontë, was slated for auction along with other manuscripts by Robert Burns and Walter Scott. Now, Sotheby’s has agreed Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Hilary Mantel has won the Walter Scott Prize . . . again.

In a satisfying full-circle moment, Hilary Mantel has won the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction with her novel The Mirror & the Light, the third book in her Booker Prize-winning, Thomas Cromwell-centered Wolf Hall trilogy—eleven years after Wolf Read more >

By Walker Caplan

You should be listening to John Murry, the moody musician who just happens to be Faulkner's cousin.

John Murry is a singer-songwriter from Mississippi, currently living in Ireland, and writing dark, lyrical, and haunting ballads about death and drugs and dysfunction and despair. So it’s not completely shocking to learn that he is related to William Faulkner, Read more >

By Emily Temple

“I could become a writer, or I could die really young.” Octavia Butler on Charlie Rose.

Today is Octavia Butler’s birthday, which is as good an excuse as any to not only bask in her writing advice but also revisit her 2000 appearance on Charlie Rose, in which Rose mispronounces “Nebula” and asks Butler why she Read more >

By Emily Temple

This is Octavia Butler's best writing advice.

On this day in 1947, the groundbreaking writer Octavia E. Butler was born in Pasadena, California. At age 48, Butler was the first sci-fi writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship. Butler’s work explored issues that still impact society, such as Read more >

By Vanessa Willoughby

20 new books to buy from your local indie (instead of you know where).

You, dear reader of this site, obviously know how important it is to support indie bookstores and shop locally. But apparently we’re currently in the Prime Day stretch, so for the skeptics, we’re just going to say: Hugh Grant will Read more >

By Katie Yee

The short story that broke the internet will soon be a movie starring Nicholas Braun (?!).

The viral short story is dead, long live the viral short story: The Hollywood Reporter has announced that StudioCanal and Imperative Entertainment are working on a new feature adaptation of Kristen Roupenian’s famous short story “Cat Person,” which sparked widespread Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Exclusive cover reveal: Melissa Febos's craft-book-meets-memoir, Body Work.

Melissa Febos, whose essay collection Girlhood was called “exquisite [and] ferocious,” is publishing a new craft book with Catapult in March 2022—and Lit Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for that book, Body Work. Catapult describes Body Work as “a brilliant exploration of how Read more >

By Literary Hub

Here are the best reviewed books of the week.

Jonathan Lee’s The Great Mistake, Kai Bird’s The Outlier, Nathan Harris’ The Sweetness of Water, and Ruth Scurr’s Napoleon 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

7 absent fathers in fiction.

The other day, I sat down to watch What a Girl Wants. In case you were living under a rock in the early 2000s, the film follows a young Amanda Bynes, the daughter of a hippie wedding singer, who dreads watching Read more >

By Katie Yee

This prestigious German TV writing competition is . . . very German.

Recently I was thrilled to learn of Writers Unplugged, a writing show in Bhopal, India where local writers compete in challenges. I love both writing and the constant human surprises of reality television, so when I heard today that Austria Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Let Tom Hiddleston read your kids a bedtime story.

Tom Hiddleston—the devilishly handsome English actor best known for his role in Terence Davies’ harrowing 2011 film adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 stage play about a tortured affair between an RAF pilot and the wife of a high court judge, Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Janet Malcolm, brilliant, boundary-breaking journalist, has died at 87.

Janet Malcolm, author of the groundbreaking and controversial The Journalist and the Murderer (first sentence: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally Read more >

By Emily Temple

The New Yorker Union has averted a strike.

After more than two and a half years of negotiations with Condé Nast, The New Yorker Union, as well as the Pitchfork and Ars Technica Unions, have averted a strike and negotiated new conditions for their workers. Some of the Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Sarah Polley is adapting Miriam Toews’s Women Talking and the cast is perfect.

Two of my favorite living artists are collaborating and I couldn’t be happier. Sarah Polley has come onboard to adapt Miriam Toews’s brilliant, disquieting 2018 novel Women Talking, about a group of women in a rural religious community coming to Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

It appears Padma Lakshmi is celebrating Hot Poet Summer by smooching Terrance Hayes.

I’ve long waited for the day that my Top Chef/poetry fanfiction would be realized IRL, and it appears that day has arrived. And friends, it is glorious. It appears that ageless host and cookbook author Padma Lakshmi is celebrating New York’s Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Move over, tea controversy—turns out Jane Austen’s brother was an abolitionist.

Recently, a series of clickbait articles started by The Telegraph claimed that Jane Austen had been “canceled for drinking tea” and was “under historical interrogation.” That was not the case. In fact, scholars and museums have been trying to parse Read more >

By Walker Caplan