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Inside the Rooms Where 20 Famous Books Were Written
We often talk about literature as if it were some kind of magic thing—like it could be conjured without effort, if only we could arrange ourselves in a certain fashion, eat the right breakfast, perform...
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A Century of Reading: The 10 Books That Defined the 1950s
Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick...
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12 Writers on Their Own Famous Books
Some books transcend their authors. We read them, and think about them, and discuss them in classrooms, online, or amongst ourselves, and in doing so we often come to a general cultural conclusion...
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10 Literary Translators on the Art of Translation
This year, for the first time, the National Book Foundation awarded a National Book Award for Translated Literature. As was no doubt their intention, the prominence of the award served not only as a...
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On James Baldwin’s Dispatches from the Heart of the Civil Rights Movement
In part one of “Beyond Simplicity,” (which originally appeared in Brick 101), Ed Pavlić explored the complex motivations that brought James Baldwin back from France to the US and sent him on a tour of...
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Counting Down the Top Literary Stories of the Year: 10 to 5
10. The Year of James Baldwin (Probably Next Year, Too) Here at Lit Hub, we’ve always been big admirers of James Baldwin, and we’d like to formally register the fact that Baldwin has always been...
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Nicholas Boggs on the Significance of James Baldwin’s Children’s Book
The New Books Network is a consortium of author-interview podcast channels dedicated to raising the level of public discourse by introducing serious authors to a wide public via new media. They publish...
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What Barry Jenkins Missed in His Adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk
“I had no childhood,” James Baldwin informed a French journalist in 1974. “I was born dead.” The dark sentiment seemed to reflect Baldwin’s own despair over his childhood; his family was poor, his...
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11 Literary Pick Up Lines for the Chronically Dateless
First things first: pick up lines don’t work. The only way they might work is if they’re funny enough that they make the person laugh, and then you also have to be attractive enough that it didn’t...
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If Beale Street Could Talk: How Does Barry Jenkins Measure Up to James Baldwin?
By a wide margin, If Beale Street Could Talk is the prestige literary adaptation of this Oscar season. Which isn’t to say it’s a better film than the other nominees (though it may very well be), but...
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James Baldwin: ‘I Never Intended to Become an Essayist’
As essayist, James Baldwin has written about life in Harlem, Paris, Atlanta; about Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jimmie Carter; and about Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Norman Mailer. In...
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James Baldwin Might Have Been Most at Home in Istanbul
You spend your whole life being told some place is home, only to get there and realize you don’t really belong. For me, it happened the summer after I turned eight. My mom and I boarded a plane from...
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James Baldwin: ‘I Can’t Accept Western Values Because They Don’t Accept Me’
This interview was conducted on April 27, 1964. It first appeared in Robert Penn Warren’s 1965 book, Who Speaks for the Negro? * Robert Penn Warren: In what sense, Mr. James Baldwin, do you think the...
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Same Phony Fear, Different Decade: On the Damaging Discourse Around Trans Rights
In 1908, one day after Christmas—fittingly, on Boxing Day—two heavyweight boxers entered a ring in Sydney, Australia. One was Jack Johnson, a tall, toned black American from Texas; the other, who...
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James Baldwin in Paris: On the Virtuosic Shame of Giovanni’s Room
Early in Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin’s seminal novelistic exploration of queerness, the narrator, David, remembers the first time he held another man’s body close to his own. He has spent a day with...
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Previewing the First Ever LGBTQ+ Rare Books Auction
“Queer history has long remained invisible,” writes Eric Marcus in the preface to a catalog of rare LGBTQ+ books and artwork headed to auction in New York on June 20. Little by little in the 50 years...
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The Quintessential American Hymn of Redemption Was Written by a Slave Trader
“Amazing Grace,” the song that informs all generic American notions of epiphanic thinking, was written by the English curate and former slave trader John Newton in 1772. Newton’s activity in the slave...
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The 50 Greatest Coming-of-Age Novels
The end of summer is traditional coming of age time. Your new best friend is going home. Your new boyfriend starts pretending not to know you. Your parents discover your secret hiding place and turn it...
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The Writer Who Rejected the Black Literary Bourgeoisie
Since at least the 1920s, in order for a Black writer to achieve literary success they would need to find a White individual or organization to sponsor them, whether it be a wealthy Park Avenue patron,...
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Ocean Vuong: The 10 Books I Needed to Write My Novel
As a culture, we often fetishize the debut writer as some sort of self-arising wunderkind, someone that comes “out of nowhere” or had “splashed onto the scene” unannounced, seemingly without a...
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