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Searching for Salvation in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
Paul was flying. As I lay supine in the intensive care unit, an IV threaded into the skin of my forearm, his face flickered in the damp vagueness between eye and lid. His body, I knew, hovered that...
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Ann Patchett on Stealing Stories, Book Tours, and Staying Off Twitter
Those of us who work and shop at Parnassus Books (this interview also appears at Parnassus’ blog) have a unique perspective on Ann Patchett’s novels because we witness their creation at somewhat close...
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Every Ending is a Kind of Apocalypse: On Belief and The Leftovers
In 1967, the British literary critic Frank Kermode published a weird, wrenching book titled The Sense of an Ending. It was both a work of literary criticism and a lament for what Kermode called “the...
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Carmen Maria Machado on Campfire Stories and Queer Teen Touchstones
Friends don’t let friends go without Carmen Maria Machado. A dear one sent me “The Husband Stitch” last year when I was in a fight with fiction, and by the time I’d finished the story, all had been...
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Searching for Salvation in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
Paul was flying. As I lay supine in the intensive care unit, an IV threaded into the skin of my forearm, his face flickered in the damp vagueness between eye and lid. His body, I knew, hovered that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ann Patchett on Stealing Stories, Book Tours, and Staying Off Twitter
Those of us who work and shop at Parnassus Books (this interview also appears at Parnassus’ blog) have a unique perspective on Ann Patchett’s novels because we witness their creation at somewhat close...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Every Ending is a Kind of Apocalypse: On Belief and The Leftovers
In 1967, the British literary critic Frank Kermode published a weird, wrenching book titled The Sense of an Ending. It was both a work of literary criticism and a lament for what Kermode called “the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Carmen Maria Machado on Campfire Stories and Queer Teen Touchstones
Friends don’t let friends go without Carmen Maria Machado. A dear one sent me “The Husband Stitch” last year when I was in a fight with fiction, and by the time I’d finished the story, all had been...
View ArticleClik here to view.
George R. R. Martin says there will be more unicorns in his ending to Game of...
Last night, on his blog, George R. R. Martin wrote a little bit about the journey that was HBO’s Game of Thrones, thanking those who worked on the show and dipping a little bit into what’s...
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Endings That Change Everything: On Alice Munro’s Literary Innovations
Some endings of works of fiction provoke the reader to look back and see the story in quite a different light. The effect of these “endings that change everything,” as I’m calling them, is to radically...
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In Praise of the Realistic Hope of Jonathan Franzen’s Endings
I’m almost sure I got my job at Lit Hub because, in my first interview, I offered my hottest Jonathan Franzen take: his books are very fun to read. In the three years since I blew the minds of no fewer...
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In Praise of the Unhappy Happy Ending
I always knew why I loved reading happy endings, but it wasn’t until I became a writer that I understood the appeal for their creators: the consolation of leaving one’s characters to a now-uneventful...
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After 50 years, the Costa Book Awards are over.
The Costa Book Awards, which was founded in 1971 and known as the Whitbread Book Awards until 2005, is no more. Today, Costa Coffee announced that the 2021 Costa Book Awards, held in February 2022,...
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Kirstin Chen on Shattering the Model Minority Myth
Counterfeit is Kirstin Chen’s third novel, after Soy Sauce for Beginners, in which a thirty-year-old leaves her husband in San Francisco and goes home to Singapore, where she is caught up in her...
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Life Advice for Book Lovers: Looking for Closure After a “Situationship”
Welcome to Life Advice for Book Lovers, Lit Hub’s advice column. You tell me what’s eating you in an email to deardorothea@lithub.com and I’ll tell you what you should read next. _______________ Dear...
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Exit Strategies: So How Are You Supposed to End a Story?
“I hate endings. Just detest them,” said Sam Shepard in an interview with The Paris Review. “Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.” Shepard is...
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On the Ending of a Literary Journal
I’m reading a book about New York in the late 1970s and it begins with a perennial observation that you can live many lifetimes in the city due to the unsentimental way it demolishes the past. I have a...
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