Literary Hub

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET TODAY: In 1904, Kate Chopin dies. What Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel can teach us about grief, literature, and growing up. | Lit Hub TV Why the tragedy of Jason Arday reflects a rigged game for today’s Black scholars. | Lit Hub Politics How environmentalism shows up in Ursula K. Le Guin’s fiction. | Lit Hub Criticism Why does Walden resonate with modern Chinese youth? “Walden is not popular in China because Chinese readers misunderstand Thoreau.

Summer isn’t over—in fact, we rue the hater who throws in the beach towel before Labor Day. But there is a definite wind down spirit to late August. Afternoon storms gather steam on a dime, scuttling picnic plans. In New York, people begin to trickle back from their vacations. We’re all a little tired. Bracing for back to school.

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET TODAY: In 1762, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is born. Learning about grief from the ghost of Sylvia Plath: “Although we may want to flee from what makes us afraid, it’s so often that these ghosts are the only ones who can help us move through the spaces of discomfort and pain.” | Lit Hub Craft “Laughing at death and dying would have been preposterous to me before knowing Max.” E. K. Schrader reflects on 10 years without Max Ritvo.

Nihao, New York Article continues after advertisement I reluctantly fork out the exorbitant surcharge for my overweight luggage, whilst wondering what is the absolute limit to the weight a single plane can carry, and if the airlines take this into account when raking in our overweight-luggage fees, or if they’ve conducted extensive statistical analyses and have determined that approximately 63 percent of people with overweight luggage would rather frantically unpack their suitcases in front...

Featuring Anjet Daanje, Carlos the Jackal, Dorthe Nors, and More Anjet Daanje’s The Song of Stork and Dromedary, Joby Warrick’s The Jackal, and Dorthe Nors’ Range all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * Fiction 1. The Song of Stork and Dromedary by Anjet Daanje (FSG) 4 Rave • 1 Positive “Daanje’s variations never become schematic or predictable.

“What haunts us doesn’t need to harm us, but can instead help guide us through what feels too difficult...” Before the ghost of Sylvia Plath haunted the yellow house on the bluff in my novel White Rabbit, she haunted me. I was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student plagued by the loss of my father’s second wife, a woman who had been a maternal figure for much of my childhood.

Faraaz Mahomed Discusses His Debut Novel Mother/Land With Damon Galgut Damon Galgut is the most generous-spirited, profoundly gifted and oddly approachable human. I am indebted in ways I can’t count for the critique, the encouragement, the consideration, the commiseration and the line edits (yes, he won the Booker Prize and then did line edits for me).

The first time I realized I was going to die I was cutting out an obituary for a project for my 6th grade class. I was working on the living room floor, as my father slouched nearby on the brown couch, reading. My eyes suddenly focused in on the age of the dead person in the newspaper—I can’t remember it now—and then something clicked. “This person died,” I told my dad, startled.

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Article continues after advertisement I have always loved television, but as a kid, television was the “idiot box.” According to experts, this device could rot my brain, influence me to commit immoral acts, and even ruin my eyesight. Sitcoms and, in later years, reality television were the lowest common denominators of the genre.

Exploring the Rise and Fall of Subscription Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media In the history of the invention of the typesetting machine and the consequent birth of mass media, Mark Twain is the Zelig of our tale, returning frequently as a typesetter in his brother’s ratty newspaper; as a tramp printer witnessing an explosion of progress in printing technology; as the bankrupted investor in the failed Paige Compositor, a competitor to the successful Linotype; as an early best-selling...