The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

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

25 new books out today!

It’s the 27th, which means that June, joltingly, is nearing its end. But with a new week comes a new slew of exciting fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (and, just as excitingly, books that bend the borders of genre). Below, you’ll Read more >

By Gabrielle Bellot

The oldest book in the world is about taxing beer.

A new “oldest book in the world” has been discovered! And it’s about tax records pertaining to beer and olive oil. Researchers at Special Collections at Graz University Library recently… …came across an Egyptian papyrus from the 3rd century BC Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Harry and Meghan are looking to tap Dickens for their next content outing.

The production company Archewell, run by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry and Meghan, is apparently in talks with Netflix over a scripted show Bad Manners, centered on Miss Havisham pre-Great Expectations, when she was just a difficult Read more >

By Janet Manley

Haruki Murakami is asking developers not to destroy the place where he decided to become a writer.

Haruki Murakami famously became a writer at a baseball game. It was April 1978, the Yakult Swallows against the Hiroshima Carp at Tokyo’s Jingu Stadium. “I think Hiroshima’s starting pitcher that day was Yoshiro Sotokoba,” Murakami wrote. Yakult countered with Read more >

By Emily Temple

Here are the winners of the 2023 Firecracker Awards.

The winners of its ninth annual Firecracker Awards were announced by the The Community of Literary Magazines & Presses in a virtual ceremony on June 22nd, and some of the year’s most talked-about titles were on the list. Each winner Read more >

By Janet Manley

Read a classic review of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower.

The child in each of us  Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was  Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one’s own place, One’s own people, One’s own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even  Loving and Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Fabio (yes, Fabio) thinks the portrayal of men in modern romance novels is "hogwash."

Oh dear. Earlier this month, Publishers Weekly reported on romance readers’ increased appetite for books with “cinnamon rolls” and “golden retrievers” as their leading men—categories that are exactly what they sound like: “sweet, supportive, and kind” (CR) and possessed of Read more >

By Emily Temple

A rare Maurice Sendak story will be published next year.

Almost 60 years after the publication of Where The Wild Things Are (November 23 will mark the rumpus), the world is getting a new children’s book from the late Maurice Sendak. HarperCollins Publishers will be releasing Ten Little Rabbits: A Read more >

By Janet Manley