The Best of Literary Hub

I copyedited for five years in the offices of an esteemed book publisher, and during that time I became an expert in the most trivial things. Minor details occupied my workdays, which I spent in a …

For what is now the seventh time in a row, I am pleased to present the best book covers of the year—as chosen by some of the industry’s best book cover designers. This year, I asked 31 design…

I think there is an element of the sacred in the beaver, if only in its deep weirdness. One million years ago, beavers the size of bears roamed North America. They pose an evolutionary puzzle, like…

“Booksellers are constantly giving their patrons extraordinary bargains. In London recently a copy of an early edition of Keats’ Poems, originally bought from a dealer for 2s was sold for £140, and…

The aim of physics is to understand how the Universe and everything in it behaves. One of the ways we try to do this is to ask questions, and as I studied more physics the question that seemed to l…

Translated from Italian by Minna Zallman Proctor 1. Through the years, there’s one story from my grandmother’s life as a girl that’s been repeatedly brought up. My grandmother, it’s said, went to P…

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 …

Are some people less susceptible to bias? How about those who are typically considered smart? We might like to think that people who are more intelligent can discern what is right or wrong and appl…

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, …

If you heard one book called “universally acknowledged as the most important of all printed books,” which do you expect it would be? If you were Margaret Leslie Davis, the answer would be obvious. …

Once it was enough to explain the Second World War as a military reaction by peace-loving nations to the imperial ambitions of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe and the Japanese military in East Asia.…

In many ways, the story of medieval economic thought begins with the life of the founder of the Franciscan Order, Saint Francis of Assisi. He was born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone in 1181 in Um…

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.…

I noticed it recently when I scheduled my dog for a veterinarian’s appointment. The person who answered the phone was friendly enough and greeted me warmly, and then I made my request. I’d like to …

«What is it that makes us talk this way? That to express a modicum of emotion, we have to reach for words like fantastic, incredible, unbelievable, and unreal, words meant to convey a certain level of magnitude, but that no longer carry their original weight.»

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…

I have a problem with plot. The problem is not with the craft concept that is “plot.” The problem is with me. Whenever I’ve tried to apply “plot” to my writing process, I can’t get it to do what a …

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…

“If creativity is about power to create something from nothing, then believing in impossible things is its most critical component.” –Oli Mould, Against Creativity * I’ll invite you to read this sl…

«Slow writing is passionate engagement, an intensified focus, a process that nurtures the creative artist.»

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…

We are now past the mid-way point in February, which is technically the shortest month, but is also the one that—for me, anyway—feels the longest. Especially this year, for all of the reasons that …

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…

American poverty is stacking up in particular cities, towns, and counties. When local governments are populated mostly by low-income people, there is typically much less money for public services. …

The following first appeared in Lit Hub’s The Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Here, in short, is what I want to tell you. Know what each sentence says, What it doesn’t say, And what…