An Ode to the Gleeful Terror of Tim Curry’s Pennywise — Tim Curry, who died this week at 80, will probably always be best known for his performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and not unreasonably. With his snug corset and un…
Why Procrastination Is So Comforting | Beren Tekin | TEDxAmerican Collegiate Institute Youth — Beren explores procrastination not as laziness, but as comfort: a shield from pressure, fear of failure, and self-doubt. Through American Collegiate Institute survey insights, she…
American Patriotism Has Always Privileged the Hopes of the Future Over the Sins of the Present — In June 1826, Thomas Jefferson penned his last-ever letter, an essay on the American project. He had been invited to attend a celebration in Washington, to mark the fiftieth anniversa
Smashwords – Home — Indie ebooks, many free.
US Stock-Index Futures Drop as Bond Yields, Oil Prices Rise — US stock-index futures fell as rising bond yields and a spike in oil prices unnerved investors.
How Translating Korean Literature Made Me a Better Fiction Writer — There is one conversation I remember most distinctly from my MFA in literary translation. I was chatting with a nonfiction student about the novel I was translating at the time when she said with a…
Pythagoras on the Purpose of Life and the Meaning of Wisdom — Abiding insight into the aim of human existence from the man who revolutionized science and coined the word “philosopher.”
5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week — Our mixum gatherum of marvelous reviews this week includes Rachel Vorona Cote on Paul Yoon’s Etna, Anahid Nersessian on Jorie Graham’s Killing Spree, Daniel Felsenthal on Molly Crabapple’s Here Whe…
How Accusations Against Black Academics Point to the Real End of “Woke 1.0” — This week, the British academy was rocked by a scandal that curdled into a tragedy. Jason Arday, a neurodivergent Black Cambridge professor who was feted as a wunderkind by some and denigrated as a…
Weezer Break Out Live Rarities At The Gathering Tour Kickoff: Watch — A couple of weeks ago, alt-rock institution Weezer released the Gold Album, which they recorded with producers Kenneth Blume and Klas Åhlund. Every new Weezer album seems like it’s partly an excuse to kick…
Anaïs Nin on Why Emotional Excess is Essential to Creativity — “Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
What Barriers Do Women in Science Face When Trying to Publish? — I went to high school and college at the height of the women’s liberation movement, in the 1970s. We knew that sexism was a problem—but we were solving it. My father, the center of our household, e…
Guggenheim's Walsh Says Firm Is Cooperating With Regulators — Anne Walsh, chief investment officer of Guggenheim Partners, says the asset management firm is fully cooperating with regulators as they investigate an accounting issue at one of its subsidiaries. US prosecutors are…
Francesca Wade has won the Plutarch Award for Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife. — Today, the Biographers International Organization announced the winner of the 2026 Plutarch Award for Best Biography of 2025: Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife. “Gertrude Stein: A…
Why Pope Leo quoted Gandalf in his response to the rise of AI. — In a moving message this weekend, Pope Leo XIV spoke out against the rising tide of AI and urged his followers to recommit to a radical humanism. The message—delivered in the form of an encyclical …
Why do TV cuts happen exactly where they do? This breaks down the actual grammar of how scenes end, shot by shot.
Started fermenting hot sauce in a jar on my counter. Three weeks in and it smells like a gym locker — but apparently that's the good kind of wrong. 🫙
Moonlight and the Magic of the Unnecessary — Every night, for every human being that ever was and ever will be, the Moon rises to remind us how improbably lucky we are, each of its craters a monument of the odds we prevailed against to exist,…
Lit Hub Daily: July 27, 2026 — D/Annie Liontas, Sara Nović, Chet’la Sebree and Maria Adelman discuss the literary word’s unacknowledged class system. | Lit Hub In Conversation On that time Johnny Cash almost started a riot…
LA Fire Zone Set to Get $3 Million Homes Funded by Muni Bonds — More than a year after wildfires devastated Pacific Palisades, a nonprofit is advancing a plan to tap the public debt market to create housing in the slow-to-recover Los Angeles wealthy enclave.
What It’s Like to Interview For the Job of “Astronaut” — The following is from Leroy Chiao’s Dinner with an Astronaut, and describes one step in Chiao’s late 1980s journey to becoming astronaut. * What was the astronaut interview like? I flew to Houston …
Unicorn Diversions, Robot Valets, and More: June’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books — In just a few weeks, the summer solstice marks the longest day of the year on June 21. To get you ready, here’s this month’s excellent SFF offerings. An actress joins a Time Travel Agency that’s al
Lit Hub Weekly: August 3 – 7, 2026 — Carly Mattox considers Jennette McCurdy’s Half His Age and reckons with the long literary history of age gap relationships. | Lit Hub Memoir Why mothers and their babies are the ultimate flâneurs, …
Lit Hub Weekly: June 22 – 26, 2026 — Maggie McKinley considers Joan Didion’s “future-oriented” nostalgia. | Lit Hub Criticism “I would never blame them. But being around Americans while this country is bombing mine is the last thing I…
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 Stoic Antidote to Frustration: Marcus Aurelius on How to Keep Your Mental Composure and Emotional Equanimity When People Let You Down — The art of tempering your fury with an infuriating existential truth.
40 Great New Books You May Have Missed — It feels like JD Vance has been everywhere in the last few weeks, and haven’t we suffered enough? As much as I’m enjoying the universal disdain he’s receiving from a diverse array of publications, …
How to Write a Novel in 33 Days — There’s a popular idea, fueled by countless Hollywood movies, of how writing a novel works. It goes something like this. Author is struck by inspiration. Author sits down and types in a frenzied mo…
Lit Hub Weekly: July 6 – 10, 2026 — Lisa Owens explores the “taboo” ways women writers arrange the balance between creativity with family. | Lit Hub Craft How Jane Austen subverted the kind of romance she mastered by writing Emma. | …
A Tarot Reader Considers Sylvia Plath’s Relationship to the Deck — According to Smithsonian Magazine, Sylvia Plath used the Tarot de Marseille deck, which her husband, Ted Hughes, gifted her on her 24th birthday in 1956. It is believed that she also used the Rider…
3 Kinds of Loneliness and 4 Kinds of Forever — Loneliness is the fundamental condition of life — we are born by another, but born alone; die around others (if we are lucky and loved), but die alone; we spend our lives islanded in our one …
Joby Warrick, LaToya Watkins, Katy Simpson Smith, and more: 20 new books out today! — August zooms on, or trickles on, depending on how you look at it. We’re reaching a quieter moment of the publishing cycle: a few weeks of slowness and peace before the onslaught of September.…
What Happens When We Die — “How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?”
Fish Bad, Sugar Good… And Other Medieval Ideas About Food — Although medieval ideas about food were very different to our own, its importance was widely recognized. According to Galen, food “is probably the most important of all medical subjects,” and it do…
The Satire and Style ofVanity Fair is as Relevant as Ever — In the summer of 2024, burning with anger about my place in Hollywood, where I felt I was regarded as a diversity project and not a person with believable talent, I picked up Vanity Fair by William…
5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week — Our fivesome of fabulous reviews this week includes Scaachi Khol on Dave Portnoy’s Cancel Me If You Can, James Lasdun on Irvine Welsh’s Men in Love, Gabriel Winslow-Yost on George Saunders’s Vigil,…
10 Great New Children’s Books Out in July 2026 — I’ve got a quick challenge for you, children’s book fans: Close your eyes, clear your mind, and visualize an illustration from a picture book you loved as a child. (Then open your eyes again, pleas…
Why Thoreau and Walden Resonate With Chinese Youth — When I translated Walden in 2012, I was not a Thoreau scholar. I was an immigrant chasing the American dream: two kids, two cars, two houses, a long commute to a corporate job. Translating Walden b…
2 workers share how helping kids at a community center has changed their lives — Workers at a Louisiana community center talk about how helping children has enriched their lives.
Before We Are Erased: Why I Founded Gaza Publications During the Genocide — During the early days of the genocide, I was in the city of Rafah, displaced, sleeping under a roof that I didn’t know would still be there by morning. Shells were falling around the building where…
The Black Robin and the Power of Tenacious Tenderness: How a Single Mother Brought an Entire Species Back from the Brink of Extinction — This essay is adapted from Traversal. “In the great chain of cause and effect,” Alexander von Humboldt wrote as he was teaching science to…
“Your dangerous shoe.” A Poem by Lila Matsumoto — When I woke up I discovered that Dorothy’s flatmate had taped up my broken shoe so tightly with electrical tape that I couldn’t get my foot in it to go to work. The flatmate had been very kind. He …
Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance — One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives. We are living through a time of un…
this library cataloged every book ever mentioned in a book & now you can fall down the rabbit hole of what characters were actually reading 📚✨
Lit Hub Daily: July 6, 2026 — Michael Dirda makes the case for Moby-Dick as the ultimate American novel. | Lit Hub Criticism Why the “legendary” dinner party from Plato’s Symposium is actually about love. | Lit Hub …
Asteroid hit the moon and flung rocks 120 kilometres from the crater — Researchers have watched a huge crater form on the lunar surface, and its widespread effects could help inform future exploration of the moon and other similar places
Has the Time Finally Come for Multispecies Maps? — Imagine, if you will, a college student returning from summer break for the start of a new semester. Heading to her first class of the day, she pulls up the campus map on her phone and is intrigued…
Claire Vaye Watkins on Writing a Love Letter to the Mojave Desert — The Mojave Desert is in Claire Vaye Watkins’s DNA. She was born in Bishop, four hours away from Tecopa, the town in Death Valley where her parents lived, which had no hospital, raised in Tecopa and…
The Latest Literary Scam: Emailing the Long-Dead Legends of 20th-Century Literature — In these first few years of the AI era, tens of thousands of published writers have received emails that begin something like this: Dear Fred, “I’ve long admired your novels, but feel that…
Music, the Neural Harmonics of Emotion, and How Love Recomposes the Brain — “Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.”
“Boardinghouse With No Visible Address,” a Poem by Franz Wright — So, I thought, as the door was unlocked and the landlord disappeared (no, he actually disappeared) and I got to examine the room unobserved. There it stood in its gray corner— the narrow bed, the s…
How to Love the World More: George Saunders on the Courage of Uncertainty — “In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in th…
When Fruit Is Scarce, These Monkeys Hunt Animals. The Behavior May Offer Clues About the Origins of Humans' Meat-Eating Habits — The bearded capuchins of northeastern Brazil typically eat plant-based foods, but they turn to small vertebrates when those sources are limited. Our…
Greetings from the Royal Pavilion, a stunning reminder of India in southern England — Looking up at this 18th century building, it became clear the British didn't only bring their architectural style to India. They also took some of India's style home.
Nick Cave on the Two Pillars of a Meaningful Life — “Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world.”
The Annotated Nightstand: What Serena Chopra is Reading Right Now — “Our tongues tie trying / to articulate the knot,” writes Serena Chopra in her simultaneously tender and exacting new collection A Catalog of Future Mercies. When she writes, later, “I pry this int…
The Rumpus is launching a Spanish-language magazine. — The Rumpus—that most enduring of indie online lit mags—is launching a new editorial initiative. El Arboroto is a new vertical catering to Spanish-language readers and writers. Per the press release, the new publication will…
“Wild Light” — I wake up on a Tuesday cloaked in light. The light isn’t simply radiating off me. It is spitting and sparking. It feels like a second skin. My husband begins to stir next to me. I can tell he is an…
To Dismantle the Concept of Separate but Equal, Thurgood Marshall Methodically Devised a Winning Strategy: Divide and Conquer — While other activists aimed to take down Jim Crow in one fell swoop, the future Supreme Court justice compiled a series of wins that ultimately added…
Vietnam Grab Drivers Plan Weekend Boycott Over Commission Fees — Vietnam drivers for Grab Holdings Ltd. are calling on fellow independent contractors to engage in a work stoppage this weekend to protest the ride-hailing company’s commission rate, which they say is excessive and…