The Best of Literary Hub

One Saturday evening in 1968, the poets battled on Long Island. Drinks spilled into the grass. Punches were flung; some landed. Chilean and French poets stood on a porch and laughed while the Ameri…

A message had arrived at the telegram office that morning. As the mailman approached the seaside apartment in Mumbai, India, that my grandfather Brij Kishore shared with my grandmother Chandrakanta…

Years ago I came across a children’s book called You Will Go to the Moon. It was first published in 1959 by Mae and Ira Freeman, ten years before the first moon landing. The book predicts a future …

This essay isn’t about World War II. But like any historical fiction writer publishing in 2023, it’s impossible to ignore the recent wave of WWII novels that fill bookstore shelves at the moment. A…

The night I saw Killers of the Flower Moon I dreamed wildly, fitfully. Until I went to bed, I spent my waking hours thinking about the film, and then I suppose I continued to think about it as I sl…

The situation in Gaza continues to deteriorate. At the time of this writing, some 4,200 people have been killed in Gaza in the last ten days—including over 1,000 children—hundreds of them in a horr…

About a month ago, we published a list of 50 of the best contemporary novels over 500 pages, for those of you who suddenly have a lot of extra time on your hands. But for those of us who suddenly h…

«The winner of the 2001 Man Booker prize is a wonderful if melancholic novel about memory, aging, and what it is to live a good»

Must a beach read be a novel? (If you answered yes, head here.) If you answered no please read on for a look at the nonfiction titles we’re most excited about this summer. From the history of food …

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, …

He lays a hand on my arm. He looks me in the eyes, and then, resignedly, he looks off toward the mountains. Then at me again. “I killed a man, Witold, do you understand?” Again he looks away, at th…

Medieval mappamundi have been called the encyclopedias of their age. The idea that a map can be a book of knowledge comes not from the drawings of landmasses and oceans, but from the fount of infor…

«Unusually, 34 legends are written in first person, and 80 of them use the pronoun Io, which means I in Veneziano»

When Bara parents on Madagascar tell their children to show tahotsy, or label their children’s behavior as tahotsy, they introduce their children to the cultural goal of obedience in the hierarchy.…

“That one in there—he just sits and hisses.” The school caretaker pointed to a hole underneath the old building. I crouched down, peered in, and said, “Hello there,” to the dirty, scrawny little ca…

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…

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the publication of “The Waste Land,” we invited four writers and academics—Beci Carver, Jahan Ramazani, Robert Crawford, and David Barnes—to discuss…

“The first rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.” “The second rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.” But the most important rule of fight club is: Fuck the r…

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…

When I was in fifth grade, our class was joined by a boy who had the most exquisite handwriting. It was astonishing to watch, and worse, he had no idea how good he was at it. Penmanship in elementa…

«There is a term used by both educators and forensic analysts, graphic maturity, that refers to the point when our handwriting stops looking childish.»

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…

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…

In the moments before entering every supercell thunderstorm, there’s a moment of pause that washes over me. It usually comes as daylight vanishes, a few seconds after I turn on my headlights; just …

Just when did tomatoes arrive in Europe? We can pinpoint many events of the Spanish Conquest down to the hour, but historians haven’t been able to determine even the decade that tomatoes made landf…

First things first. What makes a book cover iconic? There are no hard and fast rules, of course—like anything else, you know it when you see it. But in order to compile this list, I looked for reco…