A Heron, a Red Leaf, and a Hole in a Blue Star: Poet Jane Kenyon on the Art of Letting Go — The vital force of life is charged by the poles of holding on and letting go. We know that the price of love is loss, and yet we love anyway; that our atoms will one day belong to…
What Makes You You Makes the Universe: Nobel Laureate Erwin Schrödinger on Quantum Physics, Vedanta, and the Ongoing Mystery of What We Are — “This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole.”
This Week in Literary History: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is Performed for the First Time (Probably) — This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. The earliest existing eyewitness account of a performance of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth comes…
Jeff Rosenstock Booked For 311 Cruise 12 Years After His Petition — Among the increasing number of bands who’ve headlined their own concert cruise, 311 are veterans. The genre-melding rockers have been working with maritime music festival promoter Sixthman since 2011, and today…
Forget Albums—Pop Stars Measure Their Careers in Eras Now — Since the earthshaking success of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, artists from the Weeknd to Ariana Grande have tried to imbue their live shows with a sense of history.
On the Duplicitous Heroine in Wilkie Collins’s No Name — Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1862) is, to use its narrator’s own words, a “a narrative of dramatic disasters,” an exercise in building a “dramatic world out of a domestic chaos.” It is the story…
The Mom Test should be required reading before any user-research conversation. https://www.momtestbook.com
The Gays and Their Ghosts: Natalie Adler Recommends Queer Ghost Stories — Gays and ghosts have a natural kinship. Both may elicit fear in unsuspecting passerby. You may feel vaguely unmoored, inexplicably nervous at their presence, particularly if you, yourself, have an …
Book Prizes Don't Work How You Think — all the beans that's fit to spill
Can strong winds sweep GB&I to rare Walker Cup win? — Can the conditions in the west of Ireland can sweep Great Britain and Ireland to a rare Walker Cup win?
Reinventing the Slave Narrative: Ishmael Reed on Flight to Canada at 50 — I was fourteen when my interest in history began. I placed third in Buffalo’s citywide Richmond Speaking Contest. All three of us winners received certificates for book purchases, and I bought a pi…
Trump’s Non-Ceasefire Ceasefire with Iran Is Part of a Larger Pattern — Trump has declared himself the “President of Peace” who has ended ten wars around the world. But his ceasefires are interruptions, not resolutions, to conflicts.
10 Great New Children’s Books Out in June 2026 — In the world of children’s literature, there’s been some recent debate about whether children’s books are mostly any good. This, dear reader, is a question that I feel particularly qualified to ans…
This Week in Literary History: Joseph Conrad Becomes a British Subject — This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. Joseph Conrad was born in Berdychiv, in Russian-controlled Ukraine, in an area that had once been Poland, as Józef Teodor …
Why Americans can’t seem to quit Little House on the Prairie. — This month, a fresh adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved Little House on the Prairie arrives on Netflix. The reboot’s timing is auspicious. 2026 saw the apex of the tradwife dis…
What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week — Rachel Aviv’s You Won’t Get Free of It, Daniel Mason’s Country People, and David Thompson’s A Sudden Flicker of Light all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book M…
Jessica Tarlov, a Lonely Liberal on Fox News’ “The Five” — Tarlov occupies the hot seat on a panel of diehard conservatives, arguing for liberal values and rousing the ire of the President, who has encouraged Fox to fire her.
Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2026, Part Two — The year is half over, if you can believe it. Time marches ever forward, into the abyss. Books, though, can smooth the passage. If you choose wisely, that is. To that end, here are the novels, coll…
Nintendo confirms Legend of Zelda Switch 2 will be restocked — Here's what little we know about the limited-edition console's restock.
How the Rest of the World Sees America (Through the Eyes of Its Writers) — I’ve spent much of my career reporting outside the United States, but in recent years, many of my interviews have ended the same way: with questions to me about what is happening at home. The…
A Social Filesystem — overreacted — Formats over apps.
The Bird in You, the World in You, and the Art of Trusting Time: A Ceramics and Serpentine Raffle — One December afternoon, I arrived in Patagonia with a big blue backpack, a small bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda’s love poems, and a broken heart. (Though a heart, of course,…
Earliest alligator flourished in the wake of the dinosaur extinction — Just a few hundred thousand years after an asteroid wiped out most dinosaurs, large alligators were thriving in North America
19 Novels You Need to Read This Summer — The days are getting longer. The weather is—well, unpredictable, but trending warm. The children are becoming restless. Summer is nearly upon us, and you probably need something to read. (You signe…
Creative Arts Emmys Night 1: Strong Showings for Bad Bunny, the Muppets, and ‘The Traitors’ — See who won on Night 1 of the 2026 Creative Arts Emmys.
5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week — Our feast of fabulous reviews this week includes Niela Orr on Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine, Lily Meyer on Valeria Luiselli’s Beginning Middle End, Jonathan Derbyshire on Emily Eakin’s The French…
The City With a Stroller: Why Babies (and Mothers) Are the Best Flâneurs — In Edgar Allan Poe’s 1840 short story “The Man of the Crowd,” an unnamed narrator sits in a café and watches a busy street. He notes small details about the people passing by, and he categorizes th…
The Black List and Zando are hunting for the next great horror novel. — Attention, thrill-seekers. The Black List and Zando are teaming up on a mission to identify the next great horror novelist. Could it be you? The inaugural Evil Twin Manuscript Initiative will selec…
Conservatives Like the Liberal Arts, Actually. They Just Don’t Like the Phrase. — Some people revere the “liberal arts” while others call them useless. They’re probably talking about different things.
A Literary Haunting: What the Ghost of Sylvia Plath Taught Me About Grief — Before the ghost of Sylvia Plath haunted the yellow house on the bluff in my novel White Rabbit, she haunted me. I was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student plagued by the loss of my father’s sec…
Kareem Rahma and the Tyranny of Web Video Shows — With a relaunch of “Keep the Meter Running,” on YouTube, the new-media host is trying to turn TikTok-clip fodder into full-blown TV.
On Joan Didion and the Art of Looking Back — In Thomas Wolfe’s posthumously published novel You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), protagonist George Webber finds himself in Germany amid the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and “face to face with somethi…
Gold Holds Gain as Lower Oil and Fed Hike Temper Inflation Fears — Gold held a gain at the end of a volatile week as the Federal Reserve’s first interest-rate hike since 2023 and lower oil prices helped ease concerns about inflation.
The Rosenberg Boys - Longreads — "When Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed by the U.S. government, they left behind two sons, ages 6 and 10. All these years later, Robby and Michael are still trying to make sense of what happened."
When We Fight, We Win: Why I Am Suing Northwestern University—and the US Government — Yesterday, I filed a lawsuit against Northwestern University and—in his official capacity as Chairman of the US House of Representatives House Committee on Education and the Workforce—Michigan…
Hazlitt — All the best stories: culture, reporting, interviews, podcasts, comics and fiction from Hazlitt.
A founder I know spent two years building the 'perfect' product nobody wanted. Deleted it all last month. Now he's making something people actually ask for... in a weekend. Very different energy.
How to Have Enough: Wendell Berry on Creativity and Love — “Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a sh…
As Hitler Loomed, Hannah Arendt Undertook a Deep Analysis of German Antisemitism — Hannah Arendt’s 1936 lectures in Paris, where she had spent the past year and a half, were the first signals to the émigré population at large that she still had something to say. They were her…
How to Delight in Your Days: Poet and Gardener Ross Gay’s Yearlong Experiment in Willful Gladness — “The more you study delight, the more delight there is to study… I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight.”
Introducing IBM and NASA’s new foundation model for the Moon — The multi-modal model could help astronauts navigate craters, investigate ancient lava, and search for ice, as the US plans for a long-term lunar presence.
How the Great Zen Master and Peace Activist Thich Nhat Hanh Found Himself and Lost His Self in a Library Epiphany — “To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.”
Lit Hub Daily: August 14, 2026 — How following Octavia Butler’s advice guided Clarence A. Haynes to write a novel. | Lit Hub Craft Casey Michel explores the decline of American democracy (and the rise of the oligarch class).…
What Ann Patchett’s Whistler Gets Right and Wrong About Horses — Popular novels often stumble in telling horse stories. Authors have colts (male) growing up to become mares (female); regional riders competing in red (national) coats; horses at a lope (slow) winn…
How to Bear Your Sorrows: Nick Cave on Integrating the Darkness of Loss with the Bright Ongoingness of Life — Few things in our culture are more wounding than the concept of healing — as if the pains and losses that we suffer are an illness, a malfunction of the psyche to be…
What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week — Maggie O’Farrell’s Land, Thomas W. Laqueur’s The Dog’s Gaze, and Ann Patchett’s Whistler all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book…
How old is Ann? — From “Topics of the Times,” New York Times of 1924-11-17:
“Drinking the Bees,” a Poem by Christian Wiman — As if in moments lay plummets down which a puttering soul might stunningly plunge to a sun-splashed terrace in Marrakesh: tea so thick with mint it conjures kelp in a cylinder of sea but for the be…
The Ocean and the Meaning of Life — “Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp… the ultimate mystery of Life itself.&…
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SoftBank Shares Slide 13% After AI Chiefs Sound Alarm on Safety — <p>SoftBank Group’s shares slid the most in nearly three months after the heads of Anthropic PBC and OpenAI called on developers to tap the brakes on artificial intelligence development for safety reasons.</p>
The Depopulation — Among all the far-off places, and all the deserted and unknown cities, among all the lawless, godless regions, the Guayrá was an oasis. A small, lush country under a torn and tattered sunset, out i…
Encountering the Ghost of Ted Hughes in His Childhood Home — During my tempestuous teenage years, I was attracted to the work of Sylvia Plath. I voraciously read her poems, as well as The Bell Jar and Paul Alexander’s 2003 biography, Rough Magic. Her work re…
From Marquis de Sade to Grand Theft Auto, a Brief History of Depravity — The prisoner’s hand ached. He sat hunched over his desk in a cold tower of the Bastille jail in Paris, writing in tiny letters on a very long roll of paper—nearly 40 feet in total, made from smalle…
Capturing a Literary Icon: Beowulf Sheehan on Photographing Cormac McCarthy — Tuesday, August 12. My photo assistant Chika and I arrive at the Santa Fe Institute, Cormac’s home away from home, and load equipment into the library. Cormac is early, chatting up the kitchen staf…
August’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction — Claire Stapleton’s Don’t Be Evil, Kimon de Greef’s The Ego Trip, and Dave Ziren’s The People’s Historian all feature among the best reviewed nonfiction titles of the m…
Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI? — Booksellers are reporting mysterious bulk orders. It's thought the books are being used to train AI - and ending up pulped.
Only Roland Garros towel left, says Ukraine tennis player after Russian strike hits flat — Dayana Yastremska says her flat took a "direct hit" by a Russian missile in Odesa, and all that left was her Roland Garros towel.
Memoirs of a Black Cop: Reading Zohran Mamdani’s Newly Appointed Sheriff, Edwin Raymond — Last week, on May 29, New York City Mayor Mamdani fired New York Sheriff Anthony Miranda and appointed Edwin Raymond as his replacement. This caught my eye for a few reasons, the first being
How We Render Reality: Attention as an Instrument of Love — “Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged.”