Back in my MFA days, we read Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, and I learned for the first time writers were embarrassed to admit the influence of others. “I come down from the past, the past is my own,” wrote the poet Wallace Stevens. “I know of no one who has been particularly important […]
What’s the deal with brats this summer? June has brought us Brat the novel, Brat the album, and Brats the documentary . We at Lit Hub have decided this cannot be a coincidence. And to understand this phenomenon, we must consider the word’s cultural freight. So what is a brat, exactly? Some free association, towards […]
This is an excerpt of an interview between Eve Gleichman and Laura Blackett, co-authors of Trust & Safety , a novel about a newly-wedded straight couple who move from Brooklyn to Upstate New York and quickly become entangled with a queer polycule living the dream, analog life. They discuss their inspiration for the novel and […]
Credit…Kerstin Wichmann THE CLIFFS , by J. Courtney Sullivan An abandoned house painted purple sits on a promontory overlooking the sea in Awadapquit, Maine. As mysterious houses in fiction often do, it takes on the importance of a central character in J. Courtney Sullivan’s capacious and engaging sixth novel, “The Cliffs.” Jane Flanagan first spots […]
