Today in a ceremony at Swansea, Decatur-based American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney was announced as the winner of this year’s £20,000 Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize, which celebrates l…
Happy upfront week, to all who celebrate. And it’s an especially happy one for Steinbeck fans. Yesterday, the trailer for Netflix’s East of Eden mini-series landed, and judging from the…
Lessons in living in the Anthropocene (from the world’s most pessimistic climate writer). | Lit Hub Criticism Dear Hollywood: please stop hot-washing your literary adaptations. | Lit Hub On Anthony…
Before there was a place called New York, there was Anthony the Turk. Thought to be a Muslim born in Morocco, he possessed more wealth and property than any other non-Native person in the vicinity …
I finally caught the latest film adaptation of Wuthering Heights last week and even though I knew it had been divisive I was still disappointed in a way I hadn’t imagined. I was prepared for the fi…
Our smorgasbord of sumptuous reviews this week includes Hermione Hoby on Harriet Clark’s The Hill, Avi Shlaim on Omer Bartov’s Israel: What Went Wrong, Parul Sehgal on Gisèle Pelicot’s A Hymn to Li…
I remember the thrill of transgression I felt the first time I pulled Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization off a shelf. It was at City Lights…
Once upon a time, you couldn’t tell a story straight. The problem might be that you began as a poet. That focus on a moment, an image, that impulse to seize a scene and squeeze it dry, or spend day…
Nothing is more personal than illness and healing. So medical memoirs are not monolithic, and are written by doctors, patients, the loved ones of the sufferers, and others. The eight memorable memo…
Marge loved to talk on the phone. I hated it. But I indulged her, calling almost every day for forty years. This phone call was special. It was my adoptive mother’s birthday. Marge was turning nine…
“Primo Levi didn’t know why he deserved to survive: why him, rather than someone else?” On Primo Levi’s translation of Kafka after Auschwitz. | Lit Hub Criticism Lucy Sante recommends books about m…
Memory is my most important tool as a writer. I’m fascinated by how memory works, how it is organized, all the methods that have been developed to increase it and explore it and to summon images fr…
Not only did Kafka create a new language to describe the world, he also invented a new punctuation: he put question marks where there had never been any before. “Why” is the word that k…
It is February 2026. I am scrolling Reddit’s “isthisAI” forum, where users post photographs and videos and ask for help determining their validity. In one post, a photograph shows an iguana perched…
In the summer of 1951, a month after the Declaration celebrated its 175th anniversary, an unmarked panel truck pulled into the basement of the Library of Congress. Once loaded, it drove to the Mary…
John Adams liked to point out that Thomas Jefferson came late to the revolution. Before arriving in Philadelphia in the spring of 1775, the Virginian “knew more of the Eclipses of Jupiters Satelite…
Dopamine seems to be ubiquitous. It is invoked to explain a wide range of phenomena—by the media, on podcasts, and even by people in everyday conversations. It has been labelled the brain’s chemica…
The mahogany-colored sandstone and shale cliffs that tower over the Pacific Ocean resemble a wall of massive tree trunks, chiseled by thousands of years of wind, rain, and surf. The optical illusio…
Walk down any street and look around. The buildings you see will vary in their construction: one, two, or many stories; made of wood, brick, concrete, and steel; heated with oil or gas, cooled with…
Many years later, when Gilbert Chevalier faced a firing squad under a burning midday sun in the yard of Fort Dimanche, the worst place to be in Haiti, the volatile love of his life, and the captain…
