Lit Hub
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Choose Your Own Cover Art
It’s well-known by the literary crowd that authors don’t get to choose the artwork for their book covers. Except when they do, as in the case of Naomi Jackson, author of The Star Side of Bird Hill, who convinced her publisher…
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Dating Deviance
Between celebrating how far we’ve come and preparing for how far we have to go, now is a good time to brush up on your queer literature. Over at Lit Hub, Rebecca Brill looks at “the evolution of the Great…
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Murakami’s Starting Pitch
The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a…
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Detecting Genre
Like a detective novel, these books are characterized by a central mystery and the process of detection that leads to solving that mystery. The mystery, however, is not a crime—it’s a life. A person, usually only tangentially related to the…
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Preserving Dostoevsky’s Prose
What’s one English word to sarcastically communicate Russian cosmopolitan refinement? How would you translate a page-long sentence from Tolstoy, or “the cacophonous competing voices of Dostoevsky”? Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear (who have been married for 33 years) have translated…
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Stacks on Stacks
Consumer culture impossibly demands that we acquire possessions ad infinitum while condemning the clutter these objects inevitably produce. Over at Lit Hub, Susan Harlan surrenders to the stack: After all, how does a book find its place? Where does it…
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When to Trash Your Novel
How does a writer come to the conclusion that the a novel-in-progress needs to be ditched? Over at Lit Hub, Laura Dave reflects on the cathartic despair and relief of making the big decision: It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment…
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On Location
Sometimes where we read can be just as affecting as what we read. Over at Lit Hub, various writers describe their places of preference: Is there one among us who has not spent romantic moments in the tower of a…
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The Spooky Senses of Quintan Ana Wikswo
When we are in love, when we are in trauma, when we are fighting for survival or captivated by a hypnotic sunrise, our brains create a visual dreamscape—surreal, shape-shifting, abstracted—that stays with us as long as we live. Over at…
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The Transcendent Topography of Tomas Transtromer
[I]t’s clear this island has given him the notes to create such a magical, and enduringly beautiful score of poetry. And so questions about poetry, about its meaning, always wend their way back to the island, to Tranströmer’s grandfather, the…
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Consider the Footnote
Examining yet another fundamental element of text, Jonathan Russell Clark writes an essay “on the fine art of the footnote” over at Lit Hub.
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Less Like a Communication
This poetry was a poetry meant to be read loudly, breathlessly, full-throttle, full of sonic energy and internal rhyme. It felt less like a communication from a speaker to a reader and more like sheet music for a reader to…