This one goes out to any author who’s ever felt bad about not making it onto a list of most anticipated books of the season. And to their publicists. The book preview list is a highly imperfect form of coverage that seems to be, along with best-of the year lists, the most widely used kind […]
The woman behind one of Freud’s most influential case studies, writes Gabriel Brownstein, was not the straightforward success story of legend. THE SECRET MIND OF BERTHA PAPPENHEIM: The Woman Who Invented Freud’s Talking Cure, by Gabriel Brownstein Bertha Pappenheim stopped eating and sleeping. She lost her language and ability to move. Her eyes crossed and […]
When I was at the old Vic, I had a number of walk-ons and understudy roles—one of which was in Henry VIII with Sir John Gielgud, Harry Andrews and Dame Edith Evans. That was the production when they famously all dried on the first night. All of them—John, Harry and Edith—in that long scene between […]
Crafting a fantasy or science fiction world requires both creativity and structure, with a prerequisite care in its conception required if one wishes to succeed in suspending their readers’ disbelief. The essence of world-building lies not just in avoiding excessive exposition or sparse detail but in the foundational design itself. This is essential, for the […]
Following months of escalating protest over the organization’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza, and the recent withdrawal of over a third of this year’s nominees, the 2024 PEN America Literary Awards have now officially been canceled. In the last hour, PEN America confirmed this cancellation in a press release published on the organization’s website: […]
Another day, another literary scandal. Such is BookX in 2024. Buckle up, for today brings news of an especially strange case of dissembling, involving a fantasy author writing under a few different racial identities and a handful of pseudonyms. I’m sorry in advance if you were using your brain today for other things. The trouble […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Amanda Gorman’s poem ‘We Rise’ is an inspiring piece celebrating female empowerment and solidarity which calls upon women to support each other to bring about social change. The poem also cleverly summons the work of earlier poets who had written on the same topic. Summary Gorman begins the poem […]
It is a wonderful thing to be told that the work to which you have devoted your time, energy and passion has found an audience that understands the difficulties and accomplishments of transforming a lifetime’s experience and struggles and making all that over into story. Story is how I understand life. My family’s struggles, the […]
If you’ve ever deep-cleaned your bookshelves, you’ve likely faced some hard choices over what to hang onto and what to donate to the library. As much as you might want to clear space by off-loading beat-up copies, shelf redundancies, books you know you’ll never finish—some books just defy decluttering. The Lit Hub staff looked through […]
In the past several months, Taylor Swift has become culturally ubiquitous in a way that feels nearly terrifying. Superstardom tends to turn normal people into cartoons, projections, gods, monsters. Swift has been inching toward some sort of tipping point for a while. The most recent catalyst was, in part, love: in the midst of her […]
