Today on Xwitter, Ukraine offered up their own version of The Tortured Poets Department, honoring three Ukrainian writers who have died in the 790 days so far of the country’s war with Russia: Victoria Amelina, Maksym Kryvtsov, and Volodymyr Vakulenko. Amelina, a celebrated novelist and winner of a UNESCO City of Literature Prize as well as a European Union Prize for Literature, died due to injuries suffered during a Russian missile attack last summer. Kryvtsov, whose 2023 collection of poetry was named one of the best Ukrainian books of the year by PEN Ukraine, was killed in action fighting ..read more

On April 24, 1800, President John Adams signed an Act of Congress that moved the U.S. capitol from Philadelphia to Washington, forever denying us the spectacle of Congressmembers being regularly heckled by Philly sports fans. In the move, Congress would lose access to Philly’s libraries, so the Act also appropriated $5000 for buying books and “fitting up a suitable apartment for containing them.” With that small sum, the Library of Congress was founded and since has grown into one of the world’s largest, housing approximately 173 million items. The Library is full of not just books, but also ..read more

Mosab Abu Toha—the Palestinian poet, scholar, and librarian who was forced to flee Gaza with his family back in December—is set to release a new collection of poems this fall. According to the announcement made on Publishers Marketplace earlier today, Forest of Noise (the poet’s second collection, after 2022’s Things You May Find in My Ear) is “a collection of poems about life in Gaza and Palestine under Israeli bombardment, including odes to family, elegies to those who have not survived, lyrics to the moon, and remembrances of a life lived fully there,” and will be released by Knopf in ..read more

Nothing in my past had taught me what love was. And no songs or movies had, either, especially the ones I liked best (because they had the best tunes), such as “Mary Hamilton” or “The Foggy Foggy Dew.” I certainly didn’t want to find myself in the middle of a real-life “murder ballad” (but I did enjoy “Pretty Polly” floating through my head). I had been very fond of Charlie, but in some ways he was a repeat of Brucie—close, kind, friendly, but more like a relation than a boyfriend. Allen. Well, I admired Allen, but I always knew that he saw me as a distraction from his real purpose. At first ..read more

TODAY: In 1800, the Library of Congress is established.   “Only around half of Americans born after 1980 could hope to have earnings higher than their parents (down from ninety percent for the cohort born in 1940).” Joseph E. Stiglitz lays out the failures of neoliberal capitalism. | Lit Hub Politics Alicia D. Williams on how music and verse can spark literary passion. | Lit Hub Craft “Maybe the thirst for flight itself became a kind of madness, the kind of desire that makes risk beside the point.” A brief history of failed attempts at human flight. | Lit Hub History Hazel Hayes as ..read more

Years ago, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, I found myself writing about flight. It started as just a few paragraphs, a bit of spontaneous fiction jotted down in a notebook: a man stood on the roof of a barn, wearing a pair of enormous wings built from wood and cloth. His friend on the ground—the narrator—looked on nervously, ready to call an ambulance. And then the man jumped. Somehow, he flew. I still remember the surprise I felt as the scene spilled down the page. The thrill of liftoff, a human body lofted in midair. The whole thing only lasted a minute before the man swooned ba ..read more

Political debates often don’t take on quite the sophistication and complexity of the intellectual debates that lie behind them and, in part, motivate them. With the Iron Curtain coming down in 1991 and China declaring that it, too, was going to be a market economy, albeit “with Chinese characteristics” (whatever that meant), there was a broad consensus that the extremes of socialism/communism with government ownership (and implicitly, control) of everything, on the one hand, and a totally unfettered market (of the kind that the Mont Pelerin Society had been advocating), on the other, were thi ..read more

As a kid, reading was not an interest of mine. I found no joy in the teacher assigned phonics. Having Fun with Dick and Jane lacked adventure, emotion, and representation. Then music entered my world, and that was the hook that made me fall in love with stories. At eleven years old, I recall sitting by our record player spinning Deniece Williams’ “Silly of Me” over and over until I memorized every single word. I copied her longing lyrics into my notebook, ready to angrily shove the paper at a future boyfriend who was sure to crush my heart. Her verses captured my youthful angst of desire for ..read more

The last piece I wrote for Lit Hub, over three years ago, was about the sunk cost fallacy; a uniquely human tendency to continue pouring time, money and resources into a doomed project, investment, or relationship, not because we believe it shows promise, but because we’ve already sacrificed so much, and we desperately need that sacrifice to mean something. It’s a deeply flawed approach to life, but we all do it. At the time of writing that piece, I had just entered back into a relationship that spanned many years and had become a sort of reverse “will they won’t they?”—as in, will they or wo ..read more

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights; season three, the Hebrew Bible; season four, Journey to the West. Now, it’s short stories in the United States. The Cosmic Library has always followed notions, tangents, and moods prompted by books that can never be neatly summarized or simply decoded. This new seas ..read more