Literary Hub

TODAY: In 1820, Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty, is born.

“We await our moment, in pursuit of the picture that Corky envisaged, a portrait of a community that is too large and too brilliant.” Hua Hsu examines the visionary work of photographer and activist Corky Lee. | Lit Hub Photography
“There has been one single experience that taught me more about storytelling than anything else in my life: telling bedtime stories to my children.” Mark Cecil on what he’s learned from the toughest audience there is. | Lit Hub Craft
Shilpi Somaya Gowda recommends novels with rotating perspectives by Barbara Kingsolver, Celeste Ng, Taylor Jenkins Reid, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
“Top o’ the morning’ to ye, Zeus.” Ferdia Lennon on the role of idiom and dialect in bringing the distant past to life. | Lit Hub Criticism
“History cannot contain our story. It never could.” Jason Allen-Paisant on translating Aimé Césaire and how poetry reaches beyond history. | Words Without Borders
“I followed Lorca’s contrails south and found that his New York had been demolished and substituted.” On searching for Federico García Lorca in contemporary New York. | The Paris Review
On unions, solidarity, and the work of Herb Mills: “In 1984, his local boycotted a ship bound for apartheid South Africa for ten days.” | Jacobin
On Hmong American poetry: “The loss felt by Hmong Americans who became refugees at a young age and who continue to relive the experience through their parents’ memories echoes through the lines.” | JSTOR Daily
“‘Human beings are inherently corrupt,’ Nguyen says. But he also believes that we are equally capable of redemption.” Mari Uyehara profiles Viet Thanh Nguyen. | The Nation
Sarah Weinman reflects on Kate Middleton’s cancer diagnosis, and the understandable desire to protect your own narrative in the face of illness. | The Cut
What Toni Morrison’s rejection letters from her time as an editor at Random House reveal about an era of dramatic change in publishing. | Los Angeles Review of Books
“No matter how many books, articles, Tweets, and TikToks I’d gobbled up, it had apparently eluded me that no one was ever going to say I’d produced enough.” Kelly Stout chronicles her quest for optimal productivity. | Esquire
Margaret Atwood reflects on the enduring appeal of Carrie, fifty years on. | The New York Times
“The Paper Menagerie,” universities in crisis, and arguing in defense of imagination. | Public Books
“One set of universities serves a colonized, brutalized people, and the other, the colonizer.” Esmat Elhalaby explores the intellectual history of genocide in Gaza. | The Baffler
In this close read, Brandon Taylor makes a case for Zola’s “moral arguments against war, convention, the petty gods of the bourgeoisie” | London Review of Books
Anna Kornbluh talks to Jacobin about the literary and economic ramifications of our obsession with the individual experience. | Jacobin
Tobias Carroll recommends six new books in translation, from Bengali sci-fi to Polish Gothic. | Words Without Borders
Will Glovinsky asks, “Is our relation to the earth mainly a story of scarcity, of insatiable wants curbed by a finite planet? Or is it about humanity’s marvelous aptitude for discovering new ways to extract fresh abundance from finite resources?” | Public Books