The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

A brand new imprint will focus on publishing diasporic Vietnamese literature in English.

Today marks the announcement of Ink & Blood, a new joint imprint from Kaya Press and the Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network (DVAN), focused on the publication of diasporic Vietnamese literature in English. The first book to be translated in the Read more >

By Walker Caplan

John Steinbeck wrote a werewolf murder mystery, but you can't read it.

Before Nobel Laureate John Steinbeck became an essential part of the Western literary canon, he was an unpublished writer with three rejected novels to his name. (Relatable!) Apparently, one of these novels was a mystery called Murder at Full Moon, Read more >

By Vanessa Willoughby

On the delightfully odd homes of Margaret Wise Brown.

It all started at 118 Milton Street in Brooklyn. In this house, beloved children’s book author Margaret Wise Brown was born. Even though she only spent the first five years of her life there, for a children’s book author especially, Read more >

By Katie Yee

The week's best book drama is happening in the Times letters to the editor.

If you, like me, love low-stakes literary gossip but hate Twitter, you should probably be reading the New York Times books section’s letters to the editor. Case in point: Cynthia Ozick’s recent response-in-verse to Lionel Shriver’s review of her novella, Antiquities.  The Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Salman Rushdie has weighed in on the Philip Roth biography controversy.

Earlier this week, we learned that Skyhorse Publishing is set to republish Blake Bailey’s Phillip Roth: The Biography after the book’s initial publisher, W.W. Norton, put the book out of print due to extensive, corroborated reports that Bailey had groomed, Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Here are the best reviewed books of the week.

Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual, Claire Fuller’s Unsettled Ground, Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show, and Aminatta Forna’s The Window Seat 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

Here's the winner of the 2021 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize.

Germany’s Goethe-Institut has just announced the winner of this year’s Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, the German government-funded prize celebrating an outstanding literary translation from German into English published in the U.S. in the previous year. This year’s winner Read more >

By Walker Caplan

The language of blurbs, decoded.

Unflinching: This book is written in the present tense, which I told the author multiple times was a choice I disagreed with in our writing workshop. Do you belong to a writing workshop? Oh, you really must. They’re fantastic. Bracing: You Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Peek inside Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s annotated law school textbook.

Exciting news—or dispiriting news for would-be collectors: a Columbia Law School textbook once owned by late Supreme Court justice and legal titan Ruth Bader Ginsburg sold yesterday to an anonymous bidder for $18,125 in Heritage Auctions’ Manuscripts Auction. The textbook Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Doubleday is doubling down on Stacey Abrams thrillers.

Fresh off the barnstorming success of her debut political thriller (While Justice Sleeps has shifted over 130,000 copies since its publication earlier this month), beloved Georgia politician and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams has just sold two more Avery Keane Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Two of India's most famous writers are protesting the reissue of a Narendra Modi exam book.

Pankaj Mishra and Arundhati Roy, two of India’s most prominent and world-renowned authors, have this week spoken out against Penguin Random House India’s decision to republish Exam Warriors, a book of exam tips and advice by embattled Prime Minister Narendra Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Bob's Burgers is the most literary TV show ever. (Arguably, anyway.)

Originally, I wanted to find every literary reference in Bob’s Burgers, but the truth is there were too many to count. This is a very culturally with-it show. I would argue it rivals Gilmore Girls in the number of writers and book Read more >

By Katie Yee

Valeria Luiselli has won the world's richest prize for a novel written in English.

Today at the opening of the International Literature Festival Dublin, Dublin’s Lord Mayor Hazel Chu announced that Valeria Luiselli has won the 2021 Dublin Literary Award for Lost Children Archive, her first English-language novel. At €100,000, the award is the Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Gaza's largest bookstore has been destroyed.

The largest bookstore in Gaza, the beloved Samir Mansour Bookshop, was destroyed on Tuesday by an Israeli airstrike. The shop, which was established in 2008, had thousands of books, including the largest collection of English literature in Gaza, and was Read more >

By Emily Temple

Here's the cover for musician Warren Ellis' new book.

On 1 July 1999, Dr. Nina Simone gave a rare performance, one of her last in Britain. After the show, Australian multi-instrumentalist and composer (and bandmate of Nick Cave in both the Bad Seeds and Grinderman) Warren Ellis crept onto Read more >

By Literary Hub

UNC decided not to offer Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure after a conservative freak-out.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur fellowship, has been hired for a five-year term as a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media—despite having been pursued by Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor