According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, for the second year in a row, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free* to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we recommend: “Books...

Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary describes a jazzman as “a performer of jazz,” with the term dating back to the Jazz Age in 1926. But while it provides definitions for fancy woman, saleswoman, and madwoman, it doesn’t recognize the word jazzwoman (or jazz woman). The same holds true for sideman, which we learn means a member of a band, especially...

One of my favorite images of Zoë Schlanger, climate reporter at The Atlantic and my dear friend, sees her on her hands and knees in a sun-dappled field the first week of December, planting garlic. Everything is burnt orange and brown and crisp, the ground crunchy with frost, and the Connecticut farm where we were temporarily living was going into hibernation...

I cannot remember how I came to become so fascinated by World War I. Growing up in the 1960s, I was surrounded by World War II veterans—the neighbor who lost his arm at Iwo Jima, an uncle who stormed the beach in Normandy, the fathers of friends whose medals were hidden in drawers and closets. Maybe it was my relentless desire to be different that...

Though tightly bound by our love of books, we bibliophiles are a sundry lot, managing our obsession in a grand variety of ways. We organize by title, by author, by genre, by topic. By color, by height, by width, by depth. We shelve horizontally, vertically, face out, or in combination. With knick-knacks or without. We affix bookstore-style section...

You might have heard about sprezzatura. Baldassare Castiglione, in The Book of the Courtier, defined it as “a certain nonchalance that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought.” That was 1528. You might have read about it more recently in the New Yorker, where Roger Angell, paraphrasing...