Nina Schuyler, the award-winning climate fiction author, grew up surrounded by bodies of water in Washington State. She spent most of her summers as a girl in or on Gravelly Lake, which was carved …

Post-pandemic dystopias are at the center of Emily St. John Mandel’s most celebrated novels. Station Eleven (2014), which won the Prix des Libraires du Québec, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Toron…

Today, the National Book Foundation announced the longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Poetry. These ten titles were selected from a pool of 285 books submitted for consideration by their …

Annie Dillard, the masterful stylist and brilliant thinker, has died at 81. Her death was confirmed by her literary executor, Maggie Nelson. Dillard, who wrote in many forms and experiments, was an…

Greg Sarris’s first novel, Grand Avenue, an urban Indian story set in Santa Rosa, California, was published in 1994, during the second wave of the Native American Renaissance, which included first …

Dave Eggers’s new novel, Contrapposto, transmits a deep understanding of the impulse to make art—to study, practice, commit to making art on a regular basis, to exhibit and sell your work (or your …

The Mojave Desert is in Claire Vaye Watkins’s DNA. She was born in Bishop, four hours away from Tecopa, the town in Death Valley where her parents lived, which had no hospital, raised in Tecopa and…

Helen Benedict’s 2009 nonfiction book, The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, revealed not only what it was like to be a woman at war, but the abusive treatment of women who …

Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Jane Ciabattari! Celebrate by reading Ciabattari’s “Air and Fog, Light and Flight,” which we published in 2021! Follow that by reading Ciabat…

Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Jane Ciabattari! Celebrate by reading Ciabattari’s “Air and Fog, Light and Flight,” which we published in 2021! Follow that by reading Ciabat…

Namwali Serpell is one of the most evocative, erudite, and original writers at work today. She mixes Gothic and Afrofuturist styles in The Old Drift, her first novel, a three-family saga that spans…

In December 2019, three months before the pandemic, I was standing on a subway platform in Brooklyn when I recognized a prominent older film critic also

Lauren Rothery’s first novel offers up a trio of captivating voices from the ever-shifting cast of characters that is Hollywood, alternating perspectives in ingenious ways. She shifts between Verit…

Somewhere on the goofy/sad spectrum in AI slop news, today two novels up for the prestigious Ockham New Zealand Book Award were disqualified on the basis of their AI cover art. Obligate Carnivore, …

I wish I could say it was close, dear reader, but with 72.6% of the vote, Joyce Carol Oates won our bracket by a wide margin. We sensed that this was coming watching the returns—JCO was putting up …

Iida Turpenen’s Beasts of the Sea, translated from the Finnish by David Hackston, is a rare first novel, drawing readers into intimate connection with a little-known species, the Stellar’s sea cow.…

Olivia Laing’s innovative first novel Crudo (2018), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial prize, is written from the point of view of Kathy Acker, who Laing called “the acme of the self-inv…

Sacrament follows in natural progression Susan Straight’s bestselling novel Mecca (2022), which revolves around three characters in that date-growing city in the Coachella Valley, including Johnny …

Quan Barry is an award-winning playwright (and poet) as well as a novelist, skills which show in the virtuosity of the ensemble of characters she has created in The Unveiling. Her primary narrator …

Sasha Bonét, the author of “The Waterbearers,” shares four books about mothers who are both incredible and imperfect.

Vera, the buzzy, brilliant and preternaturally observant ten-year-old central to Gary Shteyngart’s sardonic and profoundly relevant new novel, brings a fresh, necessary perspective to our evolving …

Hal Ebbott’s extraordinary first novel, Among Friends, opens with a brief prelude in which the two friends, Amos and Emerson, meet in college. It’s August, only athletes have returned. “In the dist…

My last Lit Hub conversation with Karen E. Bender was in 2018, just before her collection The New Order was published. She mentioned that she read John Cheever’s short stories in graduate school: “…

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Portrait Writer Jean Giono (Eugene Martel, 1937)