Lithub, a new web endeavor from Electric Literature with partnerships between publishers, magazines, journals, and existing websites, launched yesterday with the aim of becoming a portal at the center of…
There are many distractions in the modern world like television and listicles. As a result, people aren’t reading in the same way they did a half century ago, opines Oliver…
Over at the Guardian, Rachel Cooke reflects on her experience as a judge for this year’s Folio prize and shares what reading the eighty submissions revealed to her about the…
Even if we already know our identity, proper representation helps us accept that identity. It’s well-established that negative/no representation has awful effects on self-esteem. When we see no one like…
Tomas Tranströmer, the beloved Swedish poet and Nobel laureate, has passed away at age 83. Tranströmer was notable for the economy of his work, its quiet optimism, and the insights…
Like its cousin apophasis, litotes is one of the stealth bombers of the rhetorical world – its anonymous ubiquity defies reason and gives it the power to strike at any…
At the Guardian, A.D. Miller wonders why writers struggle to describe the “bonds” of friendship in fiction. What he finds is that close friendships are often difficult to “rationalize” because they…
“I hate literature,” wrote Varlam Shalamov in a 1965 letter. “I do not write memoirs; nor do I write short stories.” Despite his claim, Varlam Shalamov would become one of…
Thanks to the Guardian, we are now aware of a little blog called Kindle Cover Disasters. The site collects the best of the worst e-book cover art ever to be copy-and-pasted…
For the Guardian, Moira Redmond considers the prevalence of “misleading” book titles. The article references a number of well-known texts including Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, which Redmond suggests is “sublimely about non-housekeeping.” However, Moira argues…
Hemingway’s In Our Time, Fitzgerald’s the Great Gatsby, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway were all published in 1925, the year that the BBC’s Culture site has declared the “greatest year for…