The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

Here are the winners of the 2021 Orwell Prizes.

The Orwell Foundation, which uses the work of George Orwell to celebrate honest writing and reporting, has announced the winners of their 2021 Orwell Prizes. The Orwell Prizes are the UK’s most prestigious prizes for political writing; every year, the Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Here are the best reviewed books of the week.

Brandon Taylor’s Filthy Animals, Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus, Laura Lippman’s Dream Girl, and Emma Dabiri’s What White People Can Do Next 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

Mumford & Sons banjo player Winston Marshall heroically cancels himself.

Winston Marshall (one of Mumford’s smaller adult sons, who could very well be the unshaven ghost of a Victorian street-child) has dramatically canceled himself, declaring in a long and winding Medium post that he is leaving the band. Why? Though Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

10 things all writers could learn from
Love Island. No, seriously.

On Monday, after a horrible, miserable year off due to the pandemic, my favorite television show of all time returns to ITV. That’s right, I am talking about Love Island, the boringest, stupidest, most deeply relaxing show on television. It’s Read more >

By Emily Temple

On the destruction by fire of the greatest library in the world you’ve never heard of.

The most famous “World’s Greatest Library” ever consumed by fire is that of Alexandria over 2,000 years ago (thanks, Caesar)—we don’t know exactly what was lost but we know that it was a lot. This, perhaps, is what makes such Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

No one knows why Ambrose Bierce disappeared, but here are some theories.

Happy 179th birthday, Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce—prolific short story writer, roving journalist, feared critic, biting satirist, Civil War veteran, sometime poet, “weird” fiction pioneer, and surely the most famous missing person in American literary history. Now (and with apologies to the Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Is this the best book club ever?

Here’s some Thursday joy—and inspiration for your vaccinated group hangs. Unlike many book clubs, which involve a lot of sitting and not much excitement, every month the Bushwick Book Club gathers to present original work—mostly songs, but sometimes poems, meals Read more >

By Walker Caplan

This fundraising campaign is raising money for Black literary arts organizations.

Here’s a project to keep on your radar: five groups across the country—Cave Canem Foundation in Brooklyn, NY; Furious Flower Poetry Center in Harrisonburg, VA; The Hurston/Wright Foundation in DC; Obsidian Lit in Normal, IL; and The Watering Hole in Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Which writers have the best tombstone inscriptions?

You know writers. They obsess over comma placement. They can re-write a sentence a thousand times without being satisfied. And they always have to have the final word. For people whose lives revolved so much around language, what did they Read more >

By Katie Yee

Trump is spiraling out about Jared Kushner’s book deal.

The only good thing about Jared Kushner’s book deal: it’s making Trump angry. A source told CNN that Trump is envious of Kushner’s deal with Harper Collins’s conservative imprint Broadside Books. According to a Kushner associate, the book deal is Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Amazon is destroying thousands of unsold books.

ITV News has reported that Amazon is destroying millions of unsold items each year—books, TVs, laptops, drones, headphones, computers, thousands of packaged COVID face masks are all among the waste. Undercover footage of Amazon’s Dunfermline warehouse in the UK from Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Did you know that Daryl Hannah created best literary board game of all time?

There’s not enough observational comedy based on the differences between poets and fiction writers, in my opinion. (True, the market for this kind of humor might be vanishingly small and generally obnoxious, but that’s never stopped us [poets] before!) Nowhere Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

New works from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s archives will finally be published, starting next year.

The publishing giant HarperCollins has reached an agreement with the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to acquire world publishing rights to the late Civil Rights leader’s entire archives—a collection which contains some of the “most historically important and Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

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