The Best of Literary Hub

You’d be forgiven for not knowing that the long, rich history of women playing American tackle football extends all the way back to 1896—a five-on-five scrimmage in New York City that was cut short…

Grammarly has quickly rolled back a controversial software feature after intense backlash. The short-lived feature was called “Expert Review,” and offered AI-generated writing advice delivered via …

Breakup culture is well trodden and established. When you announce to your friends that you are going through a romantic separation, people know what to do. Pints of ice cream and drinks and condol…

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, …

As a daughter of a wildlife biologist growing up in the Canadian wilderness, I’ve been fascinated with bears since I was a child. When I was only five years old, my father brought home an orphaned …

In 1994—when a young Jeff Bezos started Amazon, and Yahoo! went live, and Netscape launched the first commercial browser for the World Wide Web—a friend of Ryan Schreiber’s introduced him to the In…

Tasmania is an archipelago of some 334 islands and I live on one of them. It’s a place of wild weather with quixotic moods and vivid seasons. Below the 40th parallel in the Southern Ocean, there ar…

I helped create and run the media non-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which the late great Barbara Ehrenreich founded. In a time of journalism lay-offs, newsroom shut downs and right-wi…

How do we keep doing this—making art? My question can be read in two ways: What keeps us alive in our art; on what do we draw, year after year and project after project, to keep doing this? And, wh…

For anyone who pays attention to major literary awards, it will come as no surprise that university presses figure prominently among celebrated and vigorous publishers of contemporary poetry. In th…

I first read Einstein’s Dreams in 1993, very shortly after it was published. The author, Alan Lightman, is a physicist at MIT whose writings have illuminated the intersection of science and the hum…

Last week, The New York Times Book Review published a list of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” (Well, so far, obviously. Why not just call it the best books of the last 25 year…

Umberto Eco has examined our ongoing fascination with the Middle Ages and listed ten different versions including the “shaggy medievalism” of works like Beowulf. Much of J.R.R. Tolkien’…

How do novel reviews begin? Just like novels very often: Motherless boys may be pitied by mothers but are not infrequently envied by other boys. For the friends of the Piontek family, August 31st, …

One of the social dividends of post-war inflation in Weimar Germany was greater independence for women. It’s no coincidence that the locus for this was on the dance floor. The dance-hall clientele …

Algebra is an Arabic word. To understand its origin, we must go back to the time and place of the Arabian Nights, during the Islamic Golden Age, when the Islamic Empire was transformed into a milit…

Last year, I put together this list of the most iconic poems in the English language; it’s high time to do the same for short stories. But before we go any further, you may be asking: What do…

I. Reading Inside the shelter’s garden level cafeteria, we sat in a circle. Light from the bright, spring afternoons would beat against the floor, imbuing the space with warmth. I felt nervous. I w…

Lit Hub is excited to feature another entry in a new series from Poets.org: “enjambments,” a monthly interview series with new and established poets. This month, they spoke to Margaret …

Coconut isn’t just for eating. The immature fruit is a ready source of clean water—long-distance sail ships crossing tropical waters are said to have routinely carried immature coconuts as an emerg…

1. Once upon a time, around 2014, I began writing What’s Mine. It will be a novel about someone whose home gets invaded by this annoying person, I wrote to my agent. It turns out this annoying pers…

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, righ…

“No matter whether this treatment is carried out by sorcerers, priests, doctors, or old women, we find examples of the historic ancestry of modern nursing and the earliest forms of the art.” –Lavin…

The film Oppenheimer is approaching a worldwide gross of $1 billion, making it the highest-grossing biographical film on record. It’s a tragic irony that the scientific genius in whose shadow Oppen…

Measurement was a crucial organizing principle in ancient Egypt, but metrology itself does not begin with nilometers. To understand its place in human culture, we have to trace its roots back furth…

This week, 404 Media, which is publishing some really essential writing these days and is well worth your support, featured an excellent piece on the problem librarians are facing as their ebook co…

I’m going to tell you a few things you already know. Every time you open your phone or your computer, your brain is walking onto a battleground. The aggressors are the architects of your digital wo…

«having ADHD in the smartphone era world is much like trying to catch the rain with your hands.»

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways …

Maybe it has happened to you: a stranger catches your eye while you peruse the plant identification section of the library, or wander a mossy hillock speckled with Amanita bisporigera, or shuffle a…

“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do …

I am scared about how fast climate change is disrupting our world. At a theoretical level, I have known for decades about growing carbon dioxide emissions and resultant changes to global and local …