The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

The National Book Foundation's Innovations in Reading Prize goes to DIBS for Kids.

The National Book Foundation’s Innovations in Reading Prize is awarded every year to an individual or organization that has encouraged a lifelong love of reading. This year’s award goes to DIBS for Kids, a Nebraska-based literacy nonprofit that’s dedicated to Read more >

By Katie Yee

Happy May Day! We’re not working today.

Dear Lit Hub reader, we’re taking the day off. We’ve published a lot of great stories today, so you’ll be fine, but we’re not going to be blogging at The Hub (or replying to emails, or making jokes on the Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Adam Driver is set to star in (yet another) adaptation of a David Grann article.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that every article David Grann writes will be turned into a Hollywood film. In the last five years, four of the award-winning New Yorker staff writer’s longform pieces have been adapted for the screen (“True Crime,” “Lost Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Joy Harjo will serve a second term as U.S. Poet Laureate.

Today, the Library of Congress announced that Librarian Carla Hayden has appointed beloved poet Joy Harjo to serve a second term as the 23rd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for the United States. “Joy Harjo is such an inspiring and Read more >

By Emily Temple

Join Rita Dove, Elizabeth Alexander, and others for a virtual reading tonight.

Well, it’s almost May, and you know what that means: the end of the weirdest National Poetry Month of all of our lives. To close it out, the Academy of American Poets has organized Shelter In Poems: A Virtual Reading, Read more >

By Corinne Segal

Left-wing indie publishers have formed a coalition to support each other during the pandemic.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to highlight the massive and devastating inequality in the US, the work of socially progressive publishers is more important than ever. With the goal of supporting one another during the uncertainty of the pandemic, a Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Michelle Obama was the world's 3rd highest-paid author in 2019.

The Obamas are building a media empire, one that has already seen such immense success you would think they were Old Hollywood. Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground, scored a big victory earlier this year when a documentary Read more >

By Aaron Robertson

Everything we know about the new Tana French novel coming this fall.

I don’t know about you, but I am desperate, these days, for good news—not to mention things to look forward to. So I was happy to be alerted this afternoon to one undeniably good thing in the pipeline of the Read more >

By Emily Temple

Dozens of Portuguese writers are creating an exquisite corpse-style novel.

While the rest of us feel guilty about not using our quarantine productively, a group of 46 Portuguese writers is co-authoring a serial novel that begins with scientists searching for the vaccine to a virus that has overtaken the globe. Read more >

By Corinne Segal

Here are some book memes created by an AI meme generator.

The best thing I saw on Twitter yesterday had absolutely nothing to do with Sally Rooney; it was the delightfully bonkers AI meme generator. After nearly an hour spent in a cycle of refresh, cackle, and repeat, I’m more than Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Now you can use your favorite indie bookstore as your Zoom background.

Wish you could visit your favorite indie bookstore right now? For the next best thing (sort of), Lookout Books has partnered with a handful of beloved indie bookstores to bring you, Zoom users (as we all are now), free virtual Read more >

By Julia Hass

Even our UFO content is relevant in 2020.

Before we lose our minds over the (exhilarating) mic drop yesterday by the Pentagon confirming that, yes, those images of unidentified aerial phenomena taken by Navy pilots and posted by former Blink-182 frontman and UFO enthusiast Tom DeLonge were, in fact, Read more >

By Aaron Robertson

An Alaska school board's plan to take classics off the curriculum backfired (to say the least).

There’s nothing like banning a book to make it seem cool. The Matanuska-Susitna (Mat-Su) Borough School Board, which is based in Palmer, Alaska and whose district comprises more than 19,000 students, voted to take five novels off the high school Read more >

By Corinne Segal

Turns out men give up on books they don't like way more easily than women do.

According to a recent study of ebook usage in the UK, conducted by the Audience Agency, men are likely to give up reading a book before page 50, while women more often make it to page 100 (at least). That Read more >

By Emily Temple

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Discworld adaptation.">Get ready for an "absolutely faithful" Discworld adaptation.

Fun Fact: I once interviewed Terry Pratchett, the patron saint of irreverent fantasy, who died in 2015, for my college newspaper back in Dublin when he visited the campus to receive an honorary degree some ten years ago. On the Discworld adaptation.">Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

20 brand-new books hitting shelves today.

The days in quarantine would all blend together if it weren’t for Tuesday, which is the day new books hit the (now metaphorical) shelves. Here are a few of the titles dropping today. You can get them from your local Read more >

By Katie Yee

Patrick Ness and Luca Guadagnino are adapting Lord of the Flies for the big screen.

Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy. Duct tape your glasses and dust off your conches because after a 30-year absence, Ralph, Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Please enjoy some oddly soothing computer-generated jokes.

I have a low-grade obsession with the project of teaching computers how to joke. I assume it has something to do with my poetry education, which gave me both a greater appreciation of humor (and the many ways in which Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Bookshop hits $1 million raised for independent bookstores.

It’s hard to believe that Bookshop, the online retailer that shares a percentage of each purchase with independent bookstores, a platform that today officially reached an incredible milestone—$1 million raised to support struggling booksellers all across the country—was supposed to be Read more >

By Aaron Robertson

Fun fact: Evelyn Waugh's first wife was also named Evelyn.

Yes, it’s true: the British author Evelyn Waugh’s first wife was also named Evelyn. (Evelyn Florence Margaret Winifred Gardner, to be precise.) But as you might imagine, if you know anything about the Taylor Swift-Taylor Lautner debacle of 2009, things Read more >

By Olivia Rutigliano