The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

Meryl Streep to star in a new Steven Soderbergh film written by Deborah Eisenberg!

Well this is a happy Hollywood mad lib: HBO Max has announced that Meryl Streep will star in Steven Soderbergh’s next project, Let Them All Talk, a lit-world cruise drama (please let this become a niche genre) written by the Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

New Books Tuesday: Your weekly guide to what’s publishing today, fiction and nonfiction.

Every week, a new crop of great new books hit the shelves. If we could read them all, we would, but since time is finite and so is the human capacity for page-turning, here are a few of the ones Read more >

By Emily Temple

Olivia Laing calls out Boris Johnson, splits £10,000 literary prize with fellow nominees.

Celebrated British writer and cultural critic Olivia Laing has been widely praised for her decision to split her James Tate Black award winnings with her fellow shortlisted authors. “I said in Crudo that competition has no place in art and Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Here are the winners of the 2019 Hugo Awards.

The winners of the 2019 Hugo Awards—one of science fiction and fantasy’s most prestigious awards, decided by the popular vote of Worldcon members—were presented last night at a ceremony at the 77th World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland. Congratulations Read more >

By Emily Temple

Grammar nerds, Medieval dicks, and more of LitHub.com’s most read stories of the week.

The great thing about editing a website is that even though you tell yourself you have a pretty good idea of what’s going to do well, you are very often wrong. In that spirit of confusion and happy accident, here Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Your weekly deal memo: Carl Zimmer, Baba Yaga, Anita Diamant & more.

My personal form of astrology is to anxiously trawl Publishers Marketplace every week. No, wait, hear me out: it’s how I can tell the only future that matters: which books I will be reading a year and a half from now. Also, Read more >

By Emily Temple

Today in "AI will replace us all." Author avatars can now read their books to you.

Every so often, we get a bit of the future that looks more like the hoverboards we were promised and less like the nightmare Octavia Butler predicted. Such is the case with the news that Chinese search engine Sogou is using Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

These are the 10 most popular books in America this week.

Hello from Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “rotten tomatoes for books!” The ten books below are the ones our readers searched for most this week—including Sarah M. Broom’s family memoir, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino’s debut essay collection, and Orange Prize-winner Téa Obreht’s Read more >

By Katie Yee

President Obama recommends Téa Obreht, Lauren Wilkinson, and more for your late summer reading.

This afternoon, on Facebook, President Barack Obama posted one of his periodic reading lists, updating us all on the books—new and old—that he’s been reading and enjoying this summer. His list, in full, is below: It’s August, so I wanted Read more >

By Emily Temple

Pour one out for Pacific Standard and its final book recommendations.

Abruptly-shuttered Pacific Standard is, in its final breaths, recommending some fall reading material in a list from contributing editor Maris Kreizman along with other contributors to the magazine. Senior editor Ted Scheinman writes, “While Pacific Standard won’t be around in the Read more >

By Corinne Segal

The cruelty is the point: Trump official suggests change to Emma Lazarus’s Statue of Liberty poem.

We used to think of id-bearing moments like this as the mask slipping off, but when acting director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli suggested yesterday that Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus”—as much a part of American Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Reese Witherspoon is adapting this 1200-word short story into a film for Netflix.

Today, Variety reported that Netflix has won the rights to Pyros, a science-fiction story based on Thomas Pierce’s flash fiction piece “Tardy Man,” which appeared in the New Yorker last August. Reese Witherspoon, the Savior of All Literature herself, is attached Read more >

By Emily Temple

New Books Tuesday: Your weekly guide to what’s publishing today, fiction and nonfiction.

Every week, a new crop of great new books hit the shelves. If we could read them all, we would, but since time is finite and so is the human capacity for page-turning, here are a few of the ones Read more >

By Emily Temple

Do you believe friends should be seen and not heard? Join a silent book club!

At my elementary school, we had something called Silent Sustained Reading (SSR), a time during which we all sat around the classroom reading whatever books we wanted in a silent and sustained manner. It turns out, you can recreate the Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Tolkien's estate to Amazon: "You shall not pass" (the Second Age).

Here’s a strange one: Amazon has run up against a potentially pretty significant impediment to their upcoming big budget adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Apparently, the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien has refused the retail and streaming behemoth permission to Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Everything is terrible, but at least we're getting a Jackie Collins documentary.

I don’t know about you, but I miss the ’80s. Everything was fine in the ’80s. (I mean, it wasn’t, but I personally didn’t know that at the time.) Plus, we were all obsessed with the extravagant, delightful, “sizzle novelist” Read more >

By Emily Temple

Who's at the popular table this week? Jia Tolentino and Richard Russo, duh.

Hello from Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “rotten tomatoes for books!” How It Works: Every day, our staff scours the most important and active outlets of literary journalism—from established national broadsheets to regional weeklies and alternative litblogs—and logs their book reviews. Each Read more >

By Katie Yee

Cruel calculator will tell you how many extra books you could read a year if you quit social media.

If you love books as much as you claim to love books on Twitter, maybe you should get off Twitter and read more books! How many more books? Ask this horrifying new calculator from Omnicalculator, which takes will tell you Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Your weekly book deal memo: Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Jemele Hill, Vivian Gornick & more.

My personal form of astrology is to anxiously trawl Publishers Marketplace every week. No, wait, hear me out: it’s how I can tell the only future that matters: which books I will be reading a year and a half from now. Also, Read more >

By Emily Temple

Everyone is sharing David Berman lyrics and poems on Twitter.

David Berman, songwriter and poet (and cartoonist), died yesterday at the age of 52. Though he never reached the widespread acclaim of Stephen Malkmus, his collaborator in the band Silver Jews, Berman was beloved to a generation of music fans Read more >

By Jonny Diamond