The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

A researcher found an old medieval manuscript and it's pretty funny.

All hail the best new bard of the Middle Ages, one Richard Heege (or possibly Heeg), whose long-overlooked 15th century manuscript captures on paper the stories told by a bawdy minstrel at some drunken revelry hundreds of years ago in Read more >

By Janet Manley

See the cover for Sloane Crosley's new memoir, Grief is for People.

Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Grief is for People, a first memoir from the sharp-eyed essayist and novelist Sloane Crosley, which will be published by MCD/FSG on February 27, 2024. Here’s a bit about the book from Read more >

By Nicole Kugel

Can you guess these famous writers by their childhood nicknames?

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 >

By Emily Temple

The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes mean it is time to rewatch that Ethan Hawke video.

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 >

By Janet Manley

24 new books out today.

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 >

By Gabrielle Bellot

Read the very first reviews of
The Catcher in the Rye.

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 >

By Dan Sheehan

Classic children's books, rewritten for The Federalist.

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 >

By Jessie Gaynor

Watch Jericho Brown in the upcoming PBS documentary series Southern Storytellers.

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 >

By Literary Hub

RIP to one of the great horny novelists of the 20th century, Milan Kundera.

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 >

By Jonny Diamond

Someone found a first edition copy of The Hobbit in a charity shop.

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 >

By Janet Manley

Read the very first reviews of To Kill a Mockingbird.

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 >

By Dan Sheehan

Americans think college isn't what it used to be.

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 >

By Janet Manley

Here is the shortlist for the ($25,000!) Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.

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 >

By Dan Sheehan

See the cover for Mary Rechner’s new collection of short stories, Marrying Friends.

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 >

By Nicole Kugel

5 books to read during jury duty.

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 >

By Nicole Kugel

27 new books out today!

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 >

By Gabrielle Bellot