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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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