The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

Yu and Me Books is asking for support after a fire.

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 >

By Janet Manley

Some authors are suing to prevent AI from "ingesting" more work. Is it too late?

AI can’t “learn” unless it has something to train on. Authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay are suing OpenAI on the grounds that ChatGPT, an OpenAI product, used their copyrighted material to improve the model, reports The Guardian: Books are Read more >

By Janet Manley

What's the story with this Colleen Hoover fellow?

This week I’ve been pressing my degrees together between my tented fingers to figure out how a book that I did not recommend—nor did any other Critic—became a bestseller. How? I’m led to believe that someone named Colleen Hoover simply Read more >

By Janet Manley

This summer, read a screenplay.

On a beautiful Sunday at the end of April, I attended an illustrious event at Downtown Manhattan’s Metrograph movie theater: a screening of the Paul Schrader classic 2017 film First Reformed followed by a discussion with Schrader, himself. But this Read more >

By Olivia Rutigliano

Read E. L. Doctorow's review of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

Today is the 61st anniversary of the death of Mississippi’s marquee modernist and the granddaddy of Southern Gothic literature: William Cuthbert Faulkner. One of the most garlanded authors in the history of American letters (with a Nobel, two Pulitzers, and Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

These are the best book covers of 2022 you (probably) haven’t seen.

This week, AIGA, the professional association for design, announced the winners of their annual 50 Books | 50 Covers competition, which this year evaluated 487 entries from 27 countries. “The jury and I were very impressed with both the quantity Read more >

By Emily Temple

25 new books out today!

It’s the 4th of July (although you’ll likely be reading this a day later), and, as befits a complicated day that some celebrate, some protest, and others simply relax on while fireworks blossom in the night, there’s a myriad of Read more >

By Gabrielle Bellot

World Editions publishing has been bought out by a senior staff member.

Fans of the publisher World Editions, which has brought translations of work by Maryse Condé, Amin Maalouf, Pilar Quintana, Jaap Robben and Zhang Yueran to English-language audiences, has found a new owner—none other than the US director Christine Swedowsky. A Read more >

By Janet Manley

26 books out in paperback this July!

July is just a day away, and, if that seems startling in its suddenness, what shouldn’t be surprising is that a new month is bringing with it a fantastic new list of books in paperback. Below, you’ll find a myriad Read more >

By Gabrielle Bellot

Read Joyce Carol Oates' 1983 review of The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake.

I’m going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There’s something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I’ll never really be Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Your stupid little ChatGPT interactions are destroying the planet. Stop.

The dizzying rise of AI and machine-learning in the last year, made manifest in the popular consciousness by ChatGPT, has followed a familiar pattern. Years (decades!) of specialized research grinds forward, yielding interesting but not necessarily groundbreaking results, until the Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Warm your bones by Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissents on the affirmative action ruling.

The Supreme Court of the United States of America sure know how to set the mood for summer, setting their flat legal pavlovas and soggy pasta salads onto the picnic table just in time for the Fourth of July. Today, Read more >

By Janet Manley

See the cover for Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe's essay collection Thunder Song.

Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Thunder Song, an essay collection from Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe—author of Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk—coming from Counterpoint next spring. Here’s some more about the book from Read more >

By Literary Hub

All hail "ambassador of gibberish" Michael Rosen, who won the PEN Pinter prize.

You might be a person of letters, but has an internationally renowned body deemed you the “ambassador of gibberish?” If not, you have something to work toward. The honorific was delivered to children’s author Michael Rosen from poet Raymond Antrobus, Read more >

By Janet Manley

USA Today is bringing back its bestseller list—with some improvements.

As most people reading this website are aware, the literary media has been in steady decline for the last two decades. So in December 2022, when USA Today announced it was putting its bestseller list “on hiatus”—internet parlance for “dead Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Drake's first book of poetry, Titles Ruin Everything, is available.

Aubrey Graham has released a book of poetry with Kenza Samir, which in straight prose translates roughly to: Drake’s poetry chapbook is outttttttt! Kenza Samir is a songwriter who has been credited on several Drake albums. You can order Titles Read more >

By Janet Manley