Lit Hub
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A Poem That Sounds Like How the World Is
In an interview at Lit Hub, Tommy Pico speaks candidly about the forces that drive his poetic process, the ways in which we police one another’s poetry with our preconceived notions of the genre, and the subsequent importance of writing in…
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Empire State of Memoir
For Lit Hub, Edward White writes about Jay Z and Morrissey’s experimental memoirs, investigating how both artists indulge and subvert what readers want from a musician’s autobiography: Where Morrissey gives us a conventional autobiography in an unconventional way—no chapters, paragraphs that…
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Book Covers: A Symptom of Sexism
For Lit Hub, book designer Jennifer Heuer reflects on sexism in publishing and analyzes “chick-lit” book covers that rely on gender stereotypes to target female readers: The bigger discussion is the genre itself: light-weight novels aimed at a female audience…
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Make Me Believe
The response to [the Handmaid’s Tale] was interesting. The English, who had already had their religious civil war, said, “Jolly good yarn.” The Canadians in their nervous way, said, “Could it happen here?” And the Americans said, “How long have…
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Reading Between the Lines
Life, the book. The long gay book. / Do you remember? Should you remember? / What are our stories about? In an essay for Lit Hub, Matthew Cheney narrates growing up during the AIDS crisis, and the intertwined relationships between…
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The Mother of Dada
Lit Hub shares images from Hannah Höch’s Life Portrait, a collection of collages from the master Dadaist’s long life of groundbreaking work. Höch’s collages explore the themes that characterize Dadaism, including fragmented identity and sexuality as the result of burgeoning…
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Daddy Wasn’t There
Anyone who made it through high school English can probably recall reading a story or two about young protagonists finding themselves in the absence of parental guidance. From whence does this orphan trope come? And why? Is this what all…
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A Better Look at Science Fiction
In an excerpt from the introduction to their new book The Big Book of Science Fiction, Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer explore what they identify as the three strains of science fiction (via the works of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H.…
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Us, as Humans, Feel Like Failures
It just means that we have a desire for our language to be able to perform in a different way than it performs, and we have a desire for a reconciliation between the individual and the social that poetry can’t fulfill,…
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The Long and Winding Road
The stories are woven together with my life and my life moved across the globe as I wrote, so the stories too took that long journey. My map of becoming a writer goes all the way around the world. At…
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Binding the Spirit World
At Lit Hub, Adrian Van Young examines the quiet re-emergence in literature of Spiritualism, a mid-19th century industry that saw mourners and mediums attempt to transcend (or dupe) the boundaries between the living and the dead.
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You Don’t Own Your Children
I mean, why not? Lit Hub puts Helen Phillips, author of Some Possible Solutions, in conversation with Matthew Vollmer, author of Gateway to Paradise, to talk about their writing processes: often, letting a story go off in strange, new territory.…