The Best of Literary Hub

In June 2002, I was on summer break, and about to enter my senior year of college. I spent those warm months working back home at The Seeing Eye, the guide dog school. It was a leisurely landscapin…

Public health, by its nature, is a shared responsibility. It extends far beyond the realm of health care to include housing, education, employment, urban planning, and more. Creating better health …

When I began reading fiction in middle school, I had a naïve and romantic idea of writing. I imagined writers isolating themselves on a mountain or sitting by the sea, at a well-lit desk, inventing…

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, …

I helped create and run the media non-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which the late great Barbara Ehrenreich founded. In a time of journalism lay-offs, newsroom shut downs and right-wi…

Tasmania is an archipelago of some 334 islands and I live on one of them. It’s a place of wild weather with quixotic moods and vivid seasons. Below the 40th parallel in the Southern Ocean, there ar…

Companies making machine learning and generative software aren’t just metaphorically ripping off books. In at least one case, they’re rather literally shredding millions of physical books to …

The child was born late: much longed for, the only son. He is five now. He sits quietly beside the well, waiting for his mother to finish drawing water. The other women look at him from the corners…

I first read Einstein’s Dreams in 1993, very shortly after it was published. The author, Alan Lightman, is a physicist at MIT whose writings have illuminated the intersection of science and the hum…

Last week, The New York Times Book Review published a list of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” (Well, so far, obviously. Why not just call it the best books of the last 25 year…

Where’s the Funny? Despite the abundant benefits of levity, somehow most of us forget or hesitate to use this tool. Just as we don’t ask questions as often as we could, we don’t use levity en…

Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is one of the loneliest books I know. Maybe this is why I kept reading and re-reading it as a lonely child. The creature’s isolation, and quest for companionship,…

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, …

One of the social dividends of post-war inflation in Weimar Germany was greater independence for women. It’s no coincidence that the locus for this was on the dance floor. The dance-hall clientele …

Algebra is an Arabic word. To understand its origin, we must go back to the time and place of the Arabian Nights, during the Islamic Golden Age, when the Islamic Empire was transformed into a milit…

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…

I. Reading Inside the shelter’s garden level cafeteria, we sat in a circle. Light from the bright, spring afternoons would beat against the floor, imbuing the space with warmth. I felt nervous. I w…

Lit Hub is excited to feature another entry in a new series from Poets.org: “enjambments,” a monthly interview series with new and established poets. This month, they spoke to Margaret …

Coconut isn’t just for eating. The immature fruit is a ready source of clean water—long-distance sail ships crossing tropical waters are said to have routinely carried immature coconuts as an emerg…

1. Once upon a time, around 2014, I began writing What’s Mine. It will be a novel about someone whose home gets invaded by this annoying person, I wrote to my agent. It turns out this annoying pers…

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, righ…

“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…

The film Oppenheimer is approaching a worldwide gross of $1 billion, making it the highest-grossing biographical film on record. It’s a tragic irony that the scientific genius in whose shadow Oppen…

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…

This week, 404 Media, which is publishing some really essential writing these days and is well worth your support, featured an excellent piece on the problem librarians are facing as their ebook co…

I’m going to tell you a few things you already know. Every time you open your phone or your computer, your brain is walking onto a battleground. The aggressors are the architects of your digital wo…

«having ADHD in the smartphone era world is much like trying to catch the rain with your hands.»

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways …

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…

“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do …

I am scared about how fast climate change is disrupting our world. At a theoretical level, I have known for decades about growing carbon dioxide emissions and resultant changes to global and local …