Literary Hub

Literary Hub serves as a central hub for literary culture, providing a reliable daily source for news, insights, and the vibrant world of contemporary literature. With an abundance of literary content available online today, it often becomes disorganized and hard to find. However, with the support of its editorial partners, Lit Hub offers readers a dependable platform for thoughtful, engaging, and enjoyable writing about everything related to books. Each day, in addition to original articles and exclusive excerpts, Literary Hub proudly presents an editorial feature from its diverse partners, which include publishers of all sizes, literary journals, bookstores, and non-profit organizations.

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On “Eleanor Rigby” as a Product of the Combined Genius of John Lennon and Paul McCartney

1 week ago | lithub.com | Ian Leslie

In the early months of 1966, whenever Paul McCartney sat down at a piano, wherever it was, he would start tinkering with a song he called “Miss Daisy Hawkins.” From the moment he found its first five syllabic notes, the song seems to have found its themes: loneliness, futility, the end of life. McCartney was twenty-three. Without discussing it, both John Lennon and Paul came back from their break with songs about death, written from a detached, omniscient perspective.
On the Real-Life Story of Deep Cover Russian Spies Living As American Families

1 week ago | lithub.com | Shaun Walker

It was a muggy, overcast afternoon in June 2010 when Ann Foley’s life unraveled. The day had got off to a pleasant enough start; Ann and her husband, Don, took their two sons, Tim and Alex, for a celebratory lunch at an Indian restaurant not far from the family home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was Tim’s twentieth birthday, and he was back from D.C. for the summer after finishing his sophomore year at George Washington University.
How Robert Crumb Channeled Mid-Century Teenage Angst Into Art

1 week ago | lithub.com | Dan Nadel

Elvis Presley was on the air, Allen Ginsberg was diagnosing the country, and the “sick” comedy of Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters, and Stan Freberg was rising. Unlike the reassuring jokes of, say, Bob Hope, these comedians peeled back the American skull to reveal confusion about sex, psychology, authority, technology, and industry.
Virginia Woolf! Ishion Hutchinson! R. Crumb! 24 new books out today.

1 week ago | lithub.com | Gabrielle Bellot

It’s April 15, just about midway through a month of drizzly days, blossoms, and ever more political chaos, a chaos rippling across the globe. It’s a difficult time to remain happy, hopeful, and certain of things from day to day, and yet one thing I remain certain about is that we need art, and that powerful, provocative, probing art still exists, art that can comfort and complicate. Art helps us through times like these.
Mario Vargas Llosa has died at 89.

1 week ago | lithub.com | Emily Temple

The Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, the last living titan of the Latin American literary “boom,” and one of the most influential writers of the Spanish-speaking world, died on Sunday at the age of 89.
Drop is a Rom-Com Psychological Thriller for Our Surveillance Age

1 week ago | lithub.com | Olivia Rutigliano

I always think about a particular scene from Her, Spike Jonze’s somewhat-prescient tech romance from 2013. Our protagonist Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) has fallen in love with his new Siri-like operating system “Samantha,” breathily voiced by Scarlett Johansson. She suggests that they try to have sex. He is perplexed, wonders how this would even be possible.
Abolitionists and Confederates: On the Complex History of American Jews During the Civil War

1 week ago | lithub.com | Richard Kreitner

Strictly speaking, the book of Exodus tells the story of national liberation. Seen in that light, the Hebrews’ escape from slavery gave them the freedom to enslave and conquer others, which, in the text, they promptly began to do. It was this narrow reading of the tale that allowed some American Jews to sit down to Passover seders cooked and served by their very own slaves, without the slights sense of contradiction or unpleasant pang of guilt.
Viet Thanh Nguyen: Most American Literature is the Literature of Empire

1 week ago | lithub.com | Viet Thanh Nguyen

One way to understand the dilemma of contemporary American literature in the age of Donald Trump is to see it as an imperial literature. The United States is a different kind of empire, exerting global hegemonic power through hundreds of military bases and a network of alliances, trade agreements, and financial and legal institutions, which add up to a US-led “international rules based order,” as Joe Biden called it.
Viet Thanh Nguyen on Finding the Foreign in Ourselves and Those Most Like Us

2 weeks ago | lithub.com | Viet Thanh Nguyen

Now we come to an end, with so many things I have not yet touched on when it comes to salvation and destruction, on writing as an other and writing about otherness. Over the course of these lectures, I have aged, and with this year, as with every passing year, I cannot help but hear the distant rumble of “Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.” My beloved, beautiful four-year-old daughter heralded this chariot, not long ago.
What Does It Mean to Be a “Good Author” When You Publish a Book?

2 weeks ago | lithub.com | Maris Kreizman

Last week the literary agent and soon-to-be author Alia Hanna Habib asked me how I’ve used my experience in the literary world to be a “good author” (my book comes out in July). Yes, this is a brag, because as someone who’s worked in and around the publishing industry for a couple of decades, it’s important to me that others think I’m a “good author.” I think Alia was referring to someone who is easy to work with, not too high maintenance, is respectful, etc.