The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

Harry Potter banned in Catholic school after exorcists advise its dark magic is real.

J. K. Rowling’s beloved Harry Potter series is once again in the news after it was banned by the St. Edward Catholic School in Tennessee. The epic fantasy series focused on young wizard Harry Potter who battles against the forces Read more >

By Eleni Theodoropoulos

Here's the 2019 Booker Prize shortlist, including Margaret Atwood and Elif Shafak.

Literary awards season is upon us! The Booker Prizes announced their 2019 shortlist this morning. Congratulations to all six shortlisters! Without further ado, here are the finalists: Margaret Atwood (Canada), The Testaments (Vintage, Chatto & Windus) Read Atwood on how she came Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

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

Antiracism for babies, spiritual noirs, and magical realism: the week in book deals.

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

The Best Book You Can Find in a Hospital Gift Shop Is About To Become a TV Show

The Five People You Meet in Heaven, a book that held my heart and tear ducts in a stranglehold for basically the whole of seventh grade, is about to become a new series. Fox has announced that the book will Read more >

By Olivia Rutigliano

14-year-old literary activist Marley Dias on how her generation is fighting for the future.

At the age of 10, Marley Dias created the viral hashtag #1000BlackGirlBooks after she was assigned to read yet another book “about a white boy and his dog.” Four years later, Coco Khan of The Guardian caught up with Dias to talk Read more >

By Corinne Segal

Rachel Cusk's house is an austere, experimental, hyper-modern masterpiece. (Shocking, right?)

In an example of life imitating art, or rather art imitating art, with the artists living within, Rachel Cusk and her husband, artist Siemon Scamell-Katz, live in a gorgeous, modern house they designed themselves on the Norfolk coast. “What we’ve Read more >

By Emily Temple

A robot read 3.5 million books to find we describe women by appearance, and men by virtue.

Researchers have used machine-learning (a reading robot!) to read 3.5 million books published between 1900 and 2008, and tally all the adjectives used to describe men and women. Not surprisingly, women in books are beautiful and men are true-hearted! Yup, Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

The Rona Jaffe Foundation celebrates six emerging women writers.

Congratulations to Selena Anderson, Magogodi oaMphela Makhene, Sarah Passino, Nicolette Polek, Elizabeth Schambelan, and Debbie Urbanski, who just won this year’s Rona Jaffe Foundation Award! For the past 25 years, the Rona Jaffe Foundation has been dedicated to supporting new female Read more >

By Katie Yee

Five brilliant young bards honored by the Poetry Foundation.

Congratulations to Franny Choi, Jane Huffman, José Olivarez, Justin Phillip Reed, and Michael Wasson, who were today announced by The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine as the winners of the 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships. The fellowship program, Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Here is the trailer for Dickinson, a sexy series about young Emily Dickinson.

I have not watched Euphoria, but based on the trailer for Dickinson, a new Apple TV+ series about the (sexy, I think?) life and times of Emily Dickinson, I imagine the show was pitched as “Euphoria meets Bright Star, plus Jane Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

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

If you have $6.2 million, you can live in Tom Clancy's 17,178-square-foot estate.

Are you a) a noted Tom Clancy stan? Or perhaps you b) just like fine waterfront properties and nice desks and living on the water? Either way, assuming you are also c) a millionaire, you’re in luck: Peregrine Cliff, the Read more >

By Emily Temple

Amazon is opening a store across the street from Nashville's Parnassus Books, because Amazon is bad.

Amazon, apparently intent on fostering the illest of will among book lovers, is opening a store directly across the street from Nashville’s Parnassus Books, an independent bookstore founded by Ann Patchett and Karen Hayes in 2011. (Full disclosure: I visited Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Here is a cool statue of Ray Bradbury riding a rocket Dr. Strangelove-style.

Befitting a writer of his propulsive imagination, this Ray Bradbury statue—unveiled on Thursday outside Waukegan Public Library, where the young Bradbury cultivated his passion for literature—is no staid, austere piece of metalwork. You’ll find no tweed blazers or grave looks Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Andrew Luck, retiring NFL star and inspiration for one of the all-time great Twitter accounts, is also a book nerd.

Star quarterback Andrew Luck shocked the big, loud world of NFL football over the weekend by announcing his retirement at age 29. With what seemed an equal measure of resolve and weariness Luck cited injuries as the main reason for Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Pirates, poets, and pop quizzes: the most-read stories of the week at LitHub.com.

Here at literary website and widget factory Lit Hub dot com, I keep an hourly eye on traffic because, uh, traffic is also readers, and when you publish things you want people to read them (with this formula we will Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Attention Hollywood: Max Brooks and Cecily von Ziegesar both just sold new novels.

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

Edward Norton's reinterpretation of Motherless Brooklyn actually looks great.

Some movie projects are doomed. It sure seemed, for a while, that Edward Norton’s adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn was one of those—Norton optioned the novel in 1999, when it was published, got New Line Cinema on board, and Read more >

By Emily Temple

Ray Bradbury still deserves birthday sex, even after all these years.

Ray Bradbury was born on this day in 1920. You know him: the renowned sci-fi and fantasy writer. You probably read Fahrenheit 451 in high school. But did you know that he tried to write for The Twilight Zone? And that he Read more >

By Katie Yee