The Best of Literary Hub

Despite the wonderful contributions that smell makes to our lives, it’s undervalued in modern Western societies. Polls conducted in both the US and the UK reported that of our five main senses, sme…

I first read Carl Sagan’s Contact and Cosmos in high school, when I was working at a bookstore that let us borrow any book we had at least two copies of on the shelves. I loved them then and was ex…

With its sweeping popularity, HBO’s The Last of Us left me wondering: what are we looking for in our pandemic stories now? I stumbled into a pandemic story in the introduction of Jenny Odell’s new …

This weekend marks the 10th anniversary of Independent Bookstore Day, the one-day book party held all across the country on the last Saturday in April every year to celebrate indie bookstores large…

In the fictional world of the Broadway musical Avenue Q, Kate Monster is a puppet with a sweet demeanor, a lavender-colored turtleneck, and a bob hairstyle. She works as an assistant kindergarten t…

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, …

The Shakespeare authorship question—the theory that William Shakespeare might not have written the works published under his name—is the most horrible, vexed, unspeakable subject in the history of …

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.»

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.…

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…

The legendary filmmaker, author, and speaker John Waters is a font of wisdom both profound and profane. In Mr. Know-It-All, an essay collection that recalls his film career and his adventures past …

“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…

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…

The meter-tall stone that has come to be called the Mesha Stele, its smooth, black basalt carved some sixteen centuries before it was unearthed from the packed, red sand of Dhiban, Jordan in 1868, …

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…

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…