Lit Hub
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This Week in Short Fiction
What do you get when you combine a missing sister, an attic door that won’t close, a biohazard cleaning team, and a cameo from two blind tabby cats named Dr. No and Mr. Goldfinger? A new Laura van den Berg…
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The Book as Christmas Present
Starting in the 1820s, when Christmas was still largely a day of feasting and religious observance, publishers helped pioneer the concept of giving mass-produced goods as presents, inventing an entire genre of books, called Gift Books, designed to be presented…
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Getting There
Success in the literary world often demands money in the real world. For Lit Hub, Lorraine Berry calls out the system that excludes working class voices from the conversation: How much more dedication did one need to prove beyond that?…
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How to Rediscover the Arctic Circle
Ben Shattuck writes for Lit Hub on the history of mapping and discovering the Arctic Circle, a history that becomes increasingly valuable as the polar ice disappears.
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Debut Novelists and the Books That Shaped Them
Lit Hub asked the seven first-time novelists shortlisted for the 2015 Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize what book inspired them to become the authors they are today. Sophie McManus says, I was ten and reading A Wizard of Earthsea…
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The Books Women Shouldn’t Read
Let me prove that I’m not a misandrist by starting [my book list] with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, because any book Paul Ryan loves that much bears some responsibility for the misery he’s dying to create. Have you read Esquire’s…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, Bryan Hurt gives us a fabulist story in which CEOs practice blood sacrifice to ensure quarterly profits. (Believable.) The story, “Contract,” went up on Lit Hub on Wednesday and is part of Hurt’s debut collection Everyone Wants to…
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Balancing Motherhood and ‘Writerhood’
Over at Lit Hub, Katy Simpson Smith discusses finding the time to write as a mother, and the difference between claiming the term “writer,” and claiming it as a job: Here on this Farm, this midwifery utopia, I am surrounded…
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The Enduring Ordinariness of Parisian Life
We’re defiant, but shaky. We can’t get over what we’ve seen, what we’ve heard, who we’ve lost, and we don’t really want to. But we’ll eventually get used to the fact that it happened. It will become part of our…
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Lauren Groff Talks Fates & Furies
In a lot of senses, this book is as much a critique of the novel as it is a novel. It’s about the assumptions we have about who gets to create, and what has been created, and how stories get…
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Paris Forever
That’s not to say being informed isn’t important—of course it is—but I suddenly felt a more important calling. I remembered the words of Marlon Brando in the wake of 9/11: “This is exactly the time for poetry!” Over at Lit…