The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

Emily St. John Mandel's moon colony novel, written entirely during COVID, comes out in April.

Exciting book news for your Monday! Emily St. John Mandel—of The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven, which could be said to be one of the great pre-COVID pandemic novels—has written a new novel, to be published by Knopf on April Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Amber Tamblyn is editing an anthology that will feature essays by Jia Tolentino and Samantha Irby.

You may know Amber Tamblyn as Joan of Arcadia or Tibby Rollins of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but throughout her career, the actor has also cemented her place as an established author. Thus far, she’s published six books, Read more >

By Vanessa Willoughby

Hear from the authors shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing.

The AKO Caine Prize for African Writing is a literature prize awarded to an African writer of a short story published in English. The prize was launched in 2000 to encourage and highlight the richness and diversity of African writing by Read more >

By Literary Hub

The American Booksellers Association promoted an anti-trans book, apologized, and then deleted it.

The American Booksellers Association has made their Twitter account private after promoting a scientifically inaccurate anti-trans book, apologizing, and then deleting the apology. The controversy started when the ABA, as part of their July “white box” promotional mailing, sent 750 Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Check out the very first reviews of The Catcher in the Rye.

“I was surrounded by phonies…They were coming in the goddam window.” 70 years ago today, The Catcher in the Rye first hit bookshelves across the US, and people still have some pretty strong opinions about J. D. Salinger’s groundbreaking debut. Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Here are the best reviewed books of the week.

Sunjeev Sahota’s China Room, Matt Bell’s Appleseed, Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North, Kristen Radtke’s Seek You, and The Letters of Shirley Jackson all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Read more >

By Book Marks

FX’s Kindred adaptation has found its star.

We’ve known since March that FX has given a pilot order to Kindred, a series adaptation of Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel of the same name. Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins—Pulitzer Prize finalist, MacArthur fellow, and consulting producer on HBO’s Watchmen—wrote the pilot, Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Colin Kaepernick is releasing a deeply personal children's book.

Colin Kaepernick—the activist quarterback blackballed by the NFL for kneeling during the national anthem at the start of games in protest of police brutality and racial inequality—is releasing a children’s book inspired by a pivotal moment in his childhood. I Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Dictionary.com just added over 300 words to its website, including "zaddy," "yeet," and "youse."

The English language is an ever-changing, sometimes confounding entity. The good folks at Dictionary.com are all too aware of this fact and have recently added over 300 new words and updated definitions to the website. The latest update follows this Read more >

By Vanessa Willoughby

The Sympathizer adaptation will star Robert Downey Jr. as all the villains.

Back in April, A24 and Rhombus Media optioned the rights to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, Nguyen’s Pulitzer-winning debut novel about a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who serves as a communist double agent after the fall of Saigon. The novel Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Shawshank Redemption is actually about the power of libraries.

Late to the party yet again, I recently saw Shawshank Redemption for the very first time. For those of you who have been living under an adjacent rock, it’s a movie based on Stephen King’s novella, starring Morgan Freeman and Read more >

By Katie Yee

I want to wear all the clothes from The Catcher in the Rye.

In honor of the 70th publication anniversary of The Catcher in the Rye, I was planning to write the definitive essay on the novel’s place in the canon, but then I remembered that no discourse in the world bores me Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Donald Trump plagiarized a glowing blurb from HarperCollins.

Donald Trump, in response to the numerous exposés on his presidency hitting shelves this year, has taken to doing angry rebuttal interviews and praising books by his political allies. But I guess it runs in the family: as Internet sleuths Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Unsurprisingly, the early coverage of Bridget Jones's Diary does not hold up.

I believe Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary, first published in the UK 25 years ago this year, is one of the funniest books ever written. This isn’t exactly an unpopular opinion. As of 2016, the book—together with its (less-satisfying) sequel Bridget Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

For the first time, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries will be available to the public.

Big publication news: over twenty-five years after they were discovered among her bed linens and towels, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries will be released to the public this fall in a global release by Liveright Publishing (North America) and Weidenfeld & Nicholson Read more >

By Walker Caplan

A new digital humanities project celebrates Dante’s impact on art around the world.

Talk about following virtue and knowledge: The Visual Agency has created DivineComedy.digital, a digital humanities tool that maps the influence of Dante Alighieri’s narrative world on art around the globe. DivineComedy.digital displays artworks that depict scenes in the Divine Comedy—illuminated Read more >

By Walker Caplan