7 Books About Women Who Put Friendship at the Center of Their Lives
Photo by Noorulabdeen Ahmad on Unsplash I have always found myself building extremely romantic friendships. Long hours lost to phone calls, text marathons, letters, no-reason gifts, the sharing of meals and secrets and small, tender intimacies. For whatever reason, it has always seemed apparent that my friendships—if handled with devotion and care—will outlast my romantic […]
John Barth, a Novelist Who Found Possibility in a ‘Used-Up’ Form
John Barth was a pioneer of literary postmodernism.Credit…Bettmann/Getty Nobody likes the comic who explains his own material, but the writer John Barth, who died on Tuesday, had a way of making explanations — of gags, of stories, of the whole creative enterprise — sing louder and funnier and truer than punchlines. The maxim “Show, don’t […]
A Murderer in the Family
Credit…Carlo Giambarresi WOLF AT THE TABLE by Adam Rapp It is not uncommon for novelists to deal with speculation about how much of their own lives makes its way into their fiction. The typical response is to deflect, with some version of how we are in all our books, and leave it at that. Adam […]
Alexandra Tanner on Vulnerability, Making Money as a Writer, and Taking Literary Shortcuts
I met Allie Tanner in November of 2016 at the Brooklyn reading series Franklin Park. The first words she ever said to me were “Are you okay?” (I was. I used to call the raffle at Franklin Park, and felt that microphones were for cowards, so I did not use them.) We’ve been together for […]
A Continent of Living Spirits: 6 Ghost Stories From Across Latin America
When my Abuela died in early 2021, I couldn’t say goodbye to her in person. The day that she died, I felt her at the end of my bed. I was twisted in guilt. I was asleep, but it was a flimsy sleep, not deep. She was laughing at me. “What are you crying for? […]
Kate Zambreno Takes Issue With What Counts as ‘Literature’
Credit…Rebecca Clarke Men’s personal narratives are dissected; women’s are “dismissed as merely autofiction or memoir,” says the author of “The Light Room: On Art and Care.” Her 2012 “Heroines” has just been reissued. Credit…Rebecca Clarke What books are on your night stand? A bit of a brag, but I just got the Annie Ernaux box […]
Ariana Grande Takes Romantic Inventory on “Eternal Sunshine”
Confessional pop music has become freighted over the years by a kind of heightened expectation. Fans see more of pop stars now, in the quasi-candid precincts of social media, which means that fans believe themselves to have an understanding of pop stars, and there is a way in which songs or albums or music videos […]
Using Claude 3 to improve your creative writing, prompt writing, brainstorming and more
using Claude 3 to improve your prompt writing Anthropic recently launched its latest large language model in the form of Claude 3 which is capable of outperforming ChatGPT in a number of areas. This quick guide will provide some more insight on how you can use Claude 3 to improve your prompt writing process as […]
Lit Hub Asks: 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers
The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to: * Hala Alyan ( The Moon That Turns You Back ) Steven Kurutz ( American Flannel: How a Band of Entrepreneurs Are Bringing the Art and Business of Making Clothes Back Home […]
The Drawers Keep Popping Open: On Sloane Crosley’s “Grief Is for People”
Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley “I CAN’T SEEM to find a moment alone with you.” These despairing words appear in a passage close to the end of Sloane Crosley’s latest book, Grief Is for People (2024). The memoir traces the best-selling essayist and novelist’s response to learning that her dear friend Russell Perreault, […]