Lit Hub
-
Hemingway and the Trendiness of the Badly Behaved Writer
While most know Hemingway to be a favorite of stereotypical “macho” literature buffs, what with the author’s tendencies for vicious criticism and outright brawling, not many know just how vulnerable he was starting out as a complete nobody in the…
-
Signifying Nothing
Shakespeare’s texts are anything but stagnant, often taking on new meanings depending on the context in which they’re experienced. In an excerpt from The Maximum Security Book Club, Mikita Brottman describes her experience of teaching Shakespeare in a maximum security…
-
Thanks, Alopecia Universalis
Someday, will it be not myself but my daughter that I hold? At Lit Hub, Helen Phillips, author of The Beautiful Bureaucrat and the newly released Some Possible Solutions, writes about parenting while (overly?) conscious of the critical eye, self-projected or…
-
When Writers Read in Empty Rooms
I wasn’t an adult. I wasn’t accomplished. I sure as hell wasn’t a novelist. I was 11, skinny and afraid, standing in front of my sixth grade class, asking if anyone liked me. Anyone? Anyone at all? Being a debut…
-
A Language Only We Can Hear
Kendrick Lamar’s debut album “Good Kid, M.A.D.D. City” contains the basic, essential elements of a novel: a protagonist faced with an antagonistic outer world, plot and its arc—from opening scene to crisis to climax on down to denouement, a narrative…
-
How to Get Your Book Beach-Ready for Summer
Where are the crossroads between literary and commercial, and would you mind giving us directions? At Lit Hub, Brian Gresko spoke to novelist Miranda Beverly-Whittemore about new endings, labeling a book a beach read, and going “full lit”: Guess what? Your publisher…
-
Waiting for Wallace
Despite its “near-canonical” status in America, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is taking its sweet time in the translation process. So far, it has only been translated into five other languages. At Lit Hub, Scott Esposito spoke to writers and translators…
-
What’s Lit Got to Do with It
We remember the 80s as decidedly uncool, art included. But shoulder pads and good writing aren’t mutually exclusive: The labels didn’t matter. What mattered was revealing the world and its beleaguered citizens rather than torturing them with edifying or otherwise…
-
Is This Water?
Graduation season is upon us again, and with it comes the vacant, cliché-ridden literary animal that is the graduation speech. Over at Lit Hub, Emily Harnett revisits David Foster Wallace’s famous Kenyon graduation speech, “This Is Water,” and marvels at…
-
Books That Appear When We Need Them Most
There is a particular way we love books that find us at exactly the right time, a love that swells beyond the dexterity of the writing or believability of the characters. Books that appear when we need them most become…
-
A Zone of Psychological Relief
Over at Lit Hub, Michele Filgate reports on the growing influence of Street Lit, which provides writing workshops and books to the homeless community in Austin, Texas. Filgate also talks with Street Lit founder Barry Maxwell, as he opens up about the “relief” reading…
-
The Long Lost Writing Life
My only real want along the way was to illuminate something about the human condition in a voice and from a point of view that could belong only to me. And if a bid for posterity beats in the heart…