Literary Hub

Literary news, essays, and book criticism. High-volume, mixed signal, but the essay output is consistently strong.

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Lauren Acampora Recommends 7 Books About Deep Human-Animal Connections

From birth, we’re surrounded by animals. We cling to stuffed animal friends, wear clothing adorned with bunnies and bears, and listen to stories of anthropomorphized creatures. The first books we encounter, too, are often tributes to animals. As a child,

Lauren AcamporaJun 9, 2026

A content creator tried to trademark “Hot Girls Read.” BookTok clapped back.

In a bit of unhinged book news, an influencer has come under fire this week after attempting to trademark the slogan “Hot Girls Read.” Allie Mitrovich, the content creator behind Allie Rose Co., took to the portal on June 3rd

Brittany AllenJun 9, 2026

Lit Hub Daily: June 9, 2026

How remaining unmarried allowed Muriel Spark’s “intellectual monster” to run free. | Lit Hub Biography Dave Eggers talks to Jane Ciabattari about writing a novel that understands visual artists (as a visual artist). | Lit Hub In Conversation Books by

Lit Hub DailyJun 9, 2026

Andrew Sean Greer, Dave Eggers, Leila Slimani, and more: 23 new books out today!

More heavy-hitters descending on our bookstores this morning: Andrew Sean Greer’s Villa Coco, Dave Eggers’s Contrapposto, and Leila Slimani’s I’ll Take the Fire are only to name a few. A healthy balance of fiction and nonfiction make up today’s offerings:

Julia HassJun 9, 2026

Villa Coco

Dinner was very late for American tastes: eight thirty. I took the Baronessa’s comment to mean I was to wear my best clothes; of course I had packed only one jacket and tie, and that only because I imagined life

Lit Hub ExcerptsJun 9, 2026

“Effaced…” A Poem by Jawdat Fakhreddine

“Effaced…” by Jawdat Fakhreddine translated by Huda Fakhreddine Effaced, our villages, squares and skies. Nothing remains but smoke, and fires roaming freely. Houses, gardens, fields, all gone. The spring choked. No one was there to say farewell. The villagers scattered

Jawdat Fakhreddine and Huda FakhreddineJun 9, 2026

Grief, Rage, and Restraint: Zinzi Clemmons on Telling Her Own Story

Being invited to interview a writer that one admires is so rewarding, and I’m thrilled that I got the chance to speak with Zinzi Clemmons about her new book Freedom: Essays. We need Clemmons’s voice. We need her critique. It

Myriam GurbaJun 9, 2026

Lauren Acompora 7 Books About Deep Human-Animal Connections

From birth, we’re surrounded by animals. We cling to stuffed animal friends, wear clothing adorned with bunnies and bears, and listen to stories of anthropomorphized creatures. The first books we encounter, too, are often tributes to animals. As a child,

Lauren AcamporaJun 9, 2026

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: Ben Fountain (Rasputin Swims the Potomac) Courtney Maum (Alan Opts Out) Nayantara Roy (Sisters of a Halved

Teddy WayneJun 9, 2026

What’s in a Book’s Name? One Writer’s Journey to Finding the Perfect Title

For me, coming up with titles is always a team effort. Titling my first book, a quirky history of people who look for the Garden of Eden on Earth, had me stumped, until my friend the writer Josh Garrett-Davis suggested

Brook Wilensky-LanfordJun 9, 2026

An “Intellectual Monster…” Why Muriel Spark Never Married

High in the Tuscan hills, a light grilling is underway. “Sexually, probably, I could be faithful,” seventy-two-year-old Spark is in the middle of explaining, “though that’s not the point.” It is 1990, and Spark, sitting neatly in an armchair in

James BaileyJun 9, 2026

Dave Eggers on Writing a Sprawling Novel of Art and Artists

Dave Eggers’s new novel, Contrapposto, transmits a deep understanding of the impulse to make art—to study, practice, commit to making art on a regular basis, to exhibit and sell your work (or your skills), collaborate with others in the art

Jane CiabattariJun 9, 2026

Here are the winners of the 61st Annual Nebula Awards.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of American (SFWA) has announced the winners of the 61st annual Nebula Awards, one of SFF’s most prestigious honors, “given to the writers of the most outstanding speculative fiction works released in 2025.” This

Drew BroussardJun 8, 2026

Here are the winners of this year’s Bram Stoker Awards.

The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has announced the recipients of the 2025 Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement. Named in honor of Bram Stoker (Dracula) and awarded annually since 1988, the awards “are given ‘for superior achievement,’ not for ‘best

Drew BroussardJun 8, 2026

“Go Get ’Em”

Illustrated by Yana Mihaylova My boyfriend’s family is supposed to visit and we have to prepare and try to match their lavish dinners and four-course crystal-and-china extravaganzas. They are going to bring a bottle of grappa with a geranium tied

Lit Hub ExcerptsJun 8, 2026

“Sneaking the Scraps Out the Back Door.” On Black Feminist Traditions of Memory Keeping

There is already a Black feminist tradition of using the arts as historical preservation. A dynamic sampling of contemporary literature and art created by Black women considers the forms of poetry, novel, memoir, book arts, visual arts, and memorial to

Mali D. CollinsJun 8, 2026

This Week in Literary History: Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita premieres in New York.

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was first published in 1955, after many rejections from American publishers, by the Paris-based Olympia Press, who really specialized in books of a different sort entirely (other titles

Literary HubJun 8, 2026

Leander Schaerlaeckens Recommends 5 Books to Better Understand the World Cup

Soccer derives its beauty from its simplicity. Twenty-players and a ball on a rectangle of grass; put the ball in the other team’s goal; don’t use your hands. What makes soccer popular, I believe, is its complexity, layered over this

Leander SchaerlaeckensJun 8, 2026

Did You Know FDR Was Present For the Most Famous At-Bat in Baseball History?

Franklin Roosevelt and Anton Cermak had achieved a certain fusion in the public imagination four and a half months earlier, on October 1, 1932, when they sat together in a box at Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Cubs were playing

Randall SullivanJun 8, 2026

In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility You Can Be “Demure and Brat All at Once”

Thick into the edits to my time-travel-rom-com novel set in the Regency era about two sisters who couldn’t be more different (one loves Jane Austen, one loves Skims), my gentle editor suggested I rethink using “demure” and “brat” to describe

Samantha SilvaJun 8, 2026

A Poet on the Factory Floor: On Daily Life in China’s Industrial Centers

on the pristine production floor the air you breathed was just another product sitting at workstations wearing antistatic rings you let out the stench of rust let in the summer breeze and revived, inside is industrialized marrow, and the Tang

Xiao HaiJun 8, 2026

A Child’s World: Sloane Crosley on the Short Fiction of Katherine Mansfield

Oh, to live in a room filled with the objects described by Katherine Mansfield. To arrange her combs, playing cards, and enamel boxes, to try on “the most amusing orange coat with a procession of black monkeys round the hem.”

Sloane CrosleyJun 8, 2026

Silent Springs, Windswept Seas: On the Environmental Vision of Rachel Carson

In her acceptance speech upon receiving the National Book Award for The Sea Around Us (1951), biologist and author Rachel Carson (1907–1964) explained: “If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there,

Carla BariczJun 8, 2026

Lit Hub Daily: June 8, 2026

Xiao Hai remembers balancing brutal night shifts on the production floor with writing poetry. | Lit Hub Memoir “We can be demure and brat, sense and sensibility, sometimes in quick succession or all at once in a single day.” The

Lit Hub DailyJun 8, 2026

Lit Hub Weekly: June 1 – 5, 2026

Sharon Blackie explores the grounding power of fairy tales. | Lit Hub Criticism What do you do when your book detailing Civil War-era censorship is censored by the US government? | Lit Hub Politics “Maybe it’s fair to call this

Lit Hub DailyJun 6, 2026

The Free Market Isn’t Really Free

In order to have a “free market,” decisions must be made about: • PROPERTY: what can be owned • MONOPOLY: what degree of market power is permissible • CONTRACT: what can be bought and sold, and on …

May 4, 20166 min read

Don DeLillo on the Life of a Book

Books. This is why we’re here this evening. Lately I’ve been looking at books that stand on two long shelves in a room just down the hall from the room where I work. Early books, paperbacks every o…

May 3, 20164 min read

How Judy Blume Changed My Life

The book that changed my life was It’s Not the End of the World by Judy Blume. I had already loved Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, and it was natural that I would want to read Blume’s next no…

May 4, 20165 min read

On Bad B&Bs, Writing As a Single-Parent, and the Presidential Elections

Lydia Millet describes herself as a “writer and conservationist,” which might sound effete, except that she works at the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity. That combination of high-conc…

May 2, 201611 min read

Fiction Can Still Do Anything It Wants: Jennifer Egan on Don DeLillo

The following is from Jennifer Egan’s introduction of Don DeLillo at the 2015 National Book Awards, where he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In a…

May 3, 20164 min read