Famous writers: they’re just like us. At least in the sense that they too were children once. And some of them even endured the ritual of a childhood nickname, whether cruel or adoring or somewhere in between. But can you Read more >
In just the past week: Union president Fran Drescher announced that SAG-AFTRA would strike after negotiations with the American Motion Picture and Television Production association broke down, in a barn burner of a speech. (“How far apart we are on Read more >
It’s the middle of July, and, almost no matter where you might be reading this from, you may have experienced some unusual weather recently, from record-breaking heatwaves to apocalyptic wildfire haze to frightening flooding. This has been a scary time Read more >
Seventy-two years ago this week, The Catcher in the Rye first hit bookshelves across the US, and people still have some pretty strong opinions about J. D. Salinger’s groundbreaking debut. Die-hard fans and rabid haters are legion. Indeed, of all Read more >
Another day, another article about how the unstoppable forces of wokeness are coming for your kids. This time, via an article in The Federalist with the snappy headline “A Woke Children’s Literature Cabal Is Conditioning Your Kid To Be An Obedient Leftist.” Read more >
PBS is at it again! Premiering on July 18th, Southern Storytellers is a three-episode docuseries aimed to “reveal Southern culture in its diversity and complexity” by “follow[ing] some of the region’s most compelling and influential contemporary creators to the places they call Read more >
I was surprised to read this morning that Milan Kundera, the eminent Czech novelist best known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, died yesterday at the age of 94. Mainly because I thought he was already dead. For a generation Read more >
Long, long ago, a 1937 first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit was forged by a printing press and sold. For a time, it was lost to man, buried in the piles of donated inventory at the Cancer Research UK Read more >
Sixty-three years ago today, a young Alabama writer by the name of Nelle Harper Lee published her debut novel: a Southern Gothic-adjacent bildungsroman about racial injustice and familial love in the American South. In the months leading up to publication, Read more >
How to explain? American confidence in higher education has dropped from 57% to 36% since 2015, per Gallup, a dramatic slide. So what changed? The mighty green lawns are still there, the dining clubs and blue chip professors, as well Read more >
The Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust has announced the shortlist for the second annual Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction is an annual $25,000 cash prize given to a writer for Read more >
Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Marrying Friends, the forthcoming collection of short stories from Mary Rechner, which will be published by Propeller Books in October. Here’s a bit about the book from the publisher: When her Read more >
For some, being summoned for jury duty is like scheduling a colonoscopy; it’s a vague adult practice that you know from sitcoms is painful but necessary to keep a system functioning. Any interaction with government bureaucracy can induce some existential Read more >
It’s another Tuesday in a sweltering July, and for those of us trying to beat the heat—especially the chthonic, oven-like warmth of New York’s subway tunnels—finding somewhere cool can feel almost transcendentally delightful. What makes a cool place even lovelier? Read more >
You probably remember Mel Gibson shaving his legs with a pore strip on his nose and Meredith Brooks playing on the CD player. What Women Want came out in 2000, directed by Nancy Meyers, and offered a bizarro spin on Read more >
This fall, hundreds of books owned by Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts will go up for auction at legendary London auction house Christie’s. In case you didn’t know (I didn’t), Watts, who died in 2021 at the age of 80, Read more >
Canadian Nobel laureate Alice Munro celebrates her 92nd birthday today. Widely regarded as one of our greatest living writers and a consummate master of the short story, Munro’s collections have earned her more prestigious literary awards than you can shake Read more >
Even when the book was just a JPEG-less placeholder on GoodReads, it was destined for big things. Now it is official: Beyond the Story: 10-Year Record of BTS, the 544-page “memoir” of K-Pop supergroup BTS has shot to number 1 Read more >
How does Gillian Flynn do it, The Cut asks today in its recurring feature. How did she write Gone Girl and then the Gone Girl screenplay and then Sharp Objects and her other blockbusters? Well, her productivity is due at Read more >
Yu and Me Books opened in December 2021 on Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and was named for owner Lucy Yu’s mother. It was the first Asian-American woman-owned bookstore on the island. Following a July 4, 2023, fire in a Read more >
