Literary Hub

Acclaimed nonfiction writer Peter Hessler joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about his new memoir, Other Rivers: A Chinese Education. Hessler, a New Yorker staff writer who first went to China as a teacher in the 1990s, explains how education there shifted between that era and 2019, when he returned to Sichuan Province with his wife and daughters to teach English again.

At presses small and large, it’s another great week for the labor movement in publishing. As of this afternoon, the University of Chicago Press Workers Guild (UCPWG) has won their union election, with a majority of the group’s 134 members voting to become a unit of the Chicago News Guild. In this decisive victory, 89% of workers voted in favor of union representation. Which should create the conditions for the first union in the press’s 130-year history.

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET TODAY: In 1923, Nella Larsen graduates from the NYPL’s Library School and becomes the first professionally trained Black librarian. How Jane Austen subverted the kind of romance she mastered by writing Emma. | Lit Hub Criticism Lisa Owens explores the “taboo” ways women writers arrange the balance between creativity with family. | Lit Hub Craft Why do our public institutions struggle with trash?

Kate Washington on Her Marriage, Rediscovering Herself, and Caregiving Fatigue The sky was a hazy yellow gray, the AQI was a “very unhealthy” three hundred, and it was one hundred degrees as I loaded my car with an overnight bag and a hopeful last-minute tote holding a swimsuit, towel, and water sandals. It was August 29, 2021, and summer’s heat wasn’t fading. The Dixie Fire still raged on, but on that day, the evacuation order for Jonesville was lifted at last. Our cabin had made it through.

Waking up to a home invasion has to be one of the scariest things—opening your eyes, and there’s someone there. A stranger in the doorway. A long-haired man in a backpack, standing over your bed with a machete. The front door wide open and the dog with her hair raised, not even barking, just stunned and staring at a fellow resembling Santa Claus standing in front of the couch with his pants down. What happens next?

Simon Paré-Poupart on the Democratic Control of Waste Management One book on waste management that has stayed by my side for years is Giants of Garbage by Canadian journalist Harold Crooks. That book is my bible. The central question it asks is a vital one: Is it possible to maintain democratic governance over waste management? Article continues after advertisement Crooks documents the ways North American cities have been pressured to subcontract garbage collection to private entities.

In the mid-2000s, the Guardian weekend magazine ran a regular feature called “Writers’ Rooms.” As a secretly aspiring writer (is there any other kind?) I couldn’t get enough, poring over the photographs of book-lined studies furnished with beautiful antique desks. These images seemed both to represent literary success, and contain the key to it.

The most dramatic moment in Jane Austen’s Emma, and, arguably, in her whole body of work, has nothing to do with romance. After all, Emma Woodhouse’s reaction to George Knightley’s proposal is a bit of a place holder. The scene in the gardens outside Hartfield swells as Knightley speaks to Emma of his desperate, undeniable longing, and then Austen writes “What did [Emma] say? Just what she ought, of course, a lady always does.” Hmmm.

From the Collection Tree of Knowledge A wooden door in front of everything. A door on my country. A door in the lake. My poems Article continues after advertisement prefer wooden hunting dogs. If I say there is a door on my heart in the poem, then there is. Now I can open this door. The door is a short door though. I must kneel down to crawl in, drag my body through with my wooden elbows. I bump into my wooden mother who is also crawling in my heart.

The idea for The Beauty of the Days Gone By first came to me while driving across Texas when my two boys were small, after immersing myself in the rich Southwestern histories of Anglo settler children taken captive by Native American raiding parties. Many of these children not only survived, but learned the skills and lifeways of their captors, often becoming fully assimilated into the cultures that had once seemed utterly foreign.