The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

Add a kick to your online shopping with these rare books from MoMA Design Store.

Here’s some news to mix up your quarantine-driven online shopping life: the MoMA Design Store has just released a selection of rare books from its archive, and they’re now on sale at its website. The books include seminal texts like Read more >

By Corinne Segal

How to shop all of our book recommendations in one place.

Here at Literary Hub, we enjoy telling people what to read. We’ve offered you personalized recommendations, our picks for the best books of the decade, long books to read, short books to read, and many more lists and suggestion-filled features. Read more >

By Literary Hub

Here's the shortlist for the £10,000 Ondaatje Prize.

Today, the shortlist for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize was announced. This £10,000 prize is awarded every year to a book—be it fiction, nonfiction, or poetry—that best evokes the spirit of a place. In other words: here’s a Read more >

By Katie Yee

This week on The Virtual Book Channel.

A month ago we launched The Virtual Book Channel as a way to help writers with new books find readers during an otherwise awful time for publishing. And while it continues to be a work very much in progress, we’re Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Michelle Obama is now officially the best celebrity reading children's books to us over the internet.

On “Mondays With Michelle Obama,” which begins today at 12pm EST, and will run from through May 11, the former first lady will livestream a reading of a classic children’s book as part of the PBS Kids Read-Along series. She Read more >

By Emily Temple

The ALA's 2019 list of most frequently challenged books is as disheartening as ever.

The American Library Association has released its annual list of the most frequently challenged books, and while Harry Potter (and the Order of the Godless Friends) and The Handmaid’s Tale (hold on now, you’re saying this is a dys-topia?) managed to Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

The 2020 World Press Photo of the Year is of a young man reciting protest poetry in Sudan.

On June 19, 2019, photographer Yasuyoshi Chiba encountered a young man in Khartoum, Sudan, reciting poetry in the middle of a protest calling for civilian rule. The result, titled “Straight Voice,” is a stunning portrait of political uprising and won Read more >

By Corinne Segal

This indie bookseller will send you personalized recommendations from her stock of used books.

An hour’s drive away from my sleepy college town, there is a magical place. It is the place my friends and I would run away to whenever we were having a rough go of it, or quite frankly, whenever we Read more >

By Katie Yee

Here are the winners of this year's LA Times Book Prizes.

This is the 40th year of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes (which celebrates excellence in the following twelve categories as well as champions new writers), but it is the first time the winners were announced on Twitter. You can Read more >

By Katie Yee

With venues closed, comedian Laura Lexx is crowdsourcing an ending for her novel.

One British comedian has found a great way to keep herself and her fans entertained amid stay-at-home orders: an audience-based novel-writing project. In March, as performance venues around the world were being shuttered, Laura Lexx dredged up an old writing project Read more >

By Aaron Robertson

Bob Dylan channels Walt Whitman in another glorious surprise release.

Feeling grateful and a little wistful the other day, listening to Bob Dylan’s “Simple Twist of Fate,” I hadn’t expected him to release a second previously unheard song less than a month after he dropped a 17-minute ballad about JFK. But the Read more >

By Aaron Robertson

This is the weird horror novel that outsold Dracula in 1897.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula has remained in print since it was first published in April 1897. A bestseller in its day, it has gone on to spawn countless derivatives and become one of the most indelible pop-cultural touchstones in recent history. Read more >

By Olivia Rutigliano

The only thing better than books is bookstore t-shirts that support booksellers.

It’s not a particularly hopeful time for literally anyone right now (unless maybe you’re getting a $1.7 million tax break?) but that doesn’t mean we should stop trying to help people whenever we can. I’m getting pretty tired of washing Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Important lessons from Edith Wharton's interior decoration manual.

I only recently learned that the first book Edith Wharton ever published was an interior design manual called The Decoration of Houses, with Ogden Codman Jr., the architect who designed her Newport home. I also just moved, so I was Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

And the winner of the $35,000 Aspen Words Literary Prize is...

The Aspen Institute has just announced the winner of their 2020 Literary Prize: Christy Lefteri, for her novel, The Beekeeper of Aleppo, which tells the story of Syrian refugees in Great Britain. The Aspen Words Literary Prize was established to celebrate Read more >

By Katie Yee

Maybe we can all be sourdough librarians in a post-pandemic world.

Putting roughly half a million Brooklyn home cooks to shame, a sourdough library in Belgium has placed 125 sourdough starters from around the world on display in a space that offers virtual tours. The Puratos Sourdough Library in St. Vith, Read more >

By Corinne Segal

Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda has died of coronavirus at 70.

After a six-week battle with coronavirus, the Chilean author Luis Sepúlveda has died at the age of 70. The government of Asturias, where he was living in Spain, confirmed his death today. The author had been hospitalized in late February Read more >

By Aaron Robertson

Meet the artist behind your new favorite literary Instagram account.

These days, everything feels a little bit bleaker than usual. But one thing that genuinely made me smile as I was panic scrolling last week? The clever designs of Read Books, Serve Looks, otherwise known as Thom Stead (Instagram bio: Read more >

By Emily Temple

Middlesex is finally being adapted for TV.

It’s been nearly twenty years since Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex (a multi-generational coming-of-age epic focusing on the travails of an intersex protagonist in 1960s Detroit) first hit shelves, and its legions of fans (the book has shifted upwards Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Christina Rossetti once wrote a poem calling out a suitor who would not take no for an answer.

In the late 1850s, the Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti wrote a poem about her annoyance with a suitor who couldn’t seem to comprehend the fact that she didn’t want to marry him—despite her telling him so quite plainly. In a Read more >

By Olivia Rutigliano