Alexander Chee on the Perpetual Importance of the Essay
Before settling into a role once held by Gay Talese and Susan Sontag, by half a dozen Pulitzer Prize-winners and a succession of other literary notables who’ve edited the annual Best American Essays...
View ArticleLive from Writers for Readers in Kansas City: Alexander Chee on Editing Best...
Writer and editor Alexander Chee joins hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell live from the annual Writers for Readers gala in Kansas City to discuss editing Best American Essays 2022. Chee...
View Article88 Writers on the Books They Loved in 2022
One of my favorite things to do in public is eavesdrop on what other people are reading. If someone is on a subway or standing at a cafe reading a book, I will do almost anything to see the cover. Drop...
View ArticleTen LGBTQ+ Authors on the Books That Taught Them
We all know the feeling of reading a book that touches us at our core. A book that somehow knows us intimately and takes us on a journey to understand ourselves more deeply. Especially for queer...
View ArticleAlexander Chee Recommends Natalia Ginzburg’s Novella Valentino
I began reading Natalia Ginzburg in translation in 2015, and as a result have read many introductions to her works by now. With each one I came to learn at least one new detail about her. She was born...
View ArticleLiterary Concertos: A Reading List of Novels Inspired by Other Art Forms
I’ve always loved art that leans into its medium: literature that resists film or television adaptation, theater that breaks the fourth wall. The economy delights me, no piece out of place, not only...
View ArticleJimin Han on Letting Your Experiences Simmer
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. There was a fire at my house two months ago. I’ve been trying to write about it for weeks now, but each draft doesn’t rise...
View ArticleNew Homelands: Alexander Chee on Lan Samantha Chang’s Hunger
In an interview she gave to The Morning News in 2005 Lan Samantha Chang described herself as someone who had at first wanted to write novels, many novels, but could not write stories more than 25 pages...
View ArticleThe 10 Best Formally Inventive Queer Memoirs
These ten books resist tidy categorization, because it is not quite right to call them “memoir” when at their center they are works of art and scholarship, philosophical treatises and critiques. They...
View ArticleSix newsletters to get you through this week.
It’s the week after the election. You’re inundated with takes, ranging from the knee-jerk-libidinal appeal to the sagely analytical post-mortem. More are certainly coming. Writers be writing. But in...
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