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 […]
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: […]
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 […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Little Shop of Horrors , the story is an unsettling tale about a parasitical species of plant which feeds upon the blood of a man who collects orchids. Perhaps a brief plot summary would be a wise place to begin. Summary ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’ is about […]
Bitter Water Opera by Nicolette Polek IN THE PENULTIMATE scene of The Red Shoes (1948), a spotlight strikes the stage. A man presents his hand to a closed door. It opens; there is nothing inside. He spins, and the spotlight spins with him. He leaps, pirouettes, and raises his arms, the spotlight following just beyond […]
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter— sign up here . On a Sunday in October, 2021, well into a second year of the pandemic, in the incipient stages of a new novel, I woke up to a total retinal detachment in my right eye. I describe the experience as palm branches […]
Credit…Eric Timothy Carlson THE SORROW APARTMENTS, by Andrea Cohen Contemporary poetry isn’t witty. That’s not to say it isn’t funny; on the contrary, it can be extremely amusing, sometimes even intentionally. But for the most part, the art form today vacillates between, on one hand, decrying social and/or personal injustices and, on the other, aiming […]
The following is the second of a six-part collaboration with Dirt about “The Myth of the Middle Class” writer. Check back here throughout the week for more on the increasingly difficult prospect of making a living as a full-time writer, or subscribe to Dirt to get the series in your inbox. _______________________ One of the […]
The illustration shows a hilly Irish countryside under a nighttime sky, with three sisters searching for their lost fourth sibling in the foreground. THE ALTERNATIVES, by Caoilinn Hughes Caoilinn Hughes’s exuberant third novel opens with Olwen Flattery, a geology professor, lecturing her undergraduate students about tectonic convergence. “ Just imagine the force it would take […]
Despite all the discussion, I suspect the impact in some subjects of ChatGPT and other similar generative AI tools has been minimal. But for me as a college writing instructor, these AI tools have had a huge impact on my day-to-day work — and not a positive one. I am regularly dealing with AI-generated papers […]
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