TODAY: n 1896, Chekhov’s The Seagull premiers in St. Petersburg and flops, prompting him to declare, “Not if I live to be seven hundred will I write another play.”
We need your help to continue our essential coverage of the literary world. Lit Hub Members get an ad-free reading experience, exclusive newsletters, editors’ recommendations, early book giveaways, and our classic Joan Didion tote. | Support Lit Hub today.
“The embodied realm is eager for inquiry, if one is willing and interested.” Emily Hyland praises the poetics of physicality. | Lit Hub Craft
You’ve heard of cottagecore, but what about bogcore? Anna North introduces you to the genre via work by Annie Proulx, Kay Chronister, Seamus Heaney and more. | Lit Hub Criticism
The first major biography of Cormac McCarthy with exclusive interviews from Pulitzer Prize-finalist Tracey Daugherty. With precision and grace, Daugherty recounts the story of one of America’s greatest novelists, unveiling the man behind the myth.
“It may be easier to reduce a nonfiction book to its takeaways than it is for a novel. But to treat the genre in this way diminishes both its literariness and its political efficacy.” Tajja Isen on the publishing industry’s nonfiction blunders. | The Walrus
“I have waited for much of my adult life for (straight) men to start a liberation movement akin to feminism, one that would publicly reject the conformity, repression, and aggression that define [this] kind of masculinity.” Rebecca Solnit enters the Manosphere. | The Nation
Set in 1991, Huckleberry Jim follows two actors—Axel Emerson, a twenty-two-year-old white actor fresh out of conservatory, and Moses Morton, a fifty-five-year-old Black actor with a lifetime of stages behind him—on a children's tour of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As the two-man company performs Twain's text to American children in the year of Anita Hill, Rodney King's arrest, and the height of the culture wars, the road between them becomes a slow reckoning with race, performance, fatherhood, and what it costs to play another man's part.
