A satirical confession, from an imagined designer who unleashed the style of book cover with “amorphous shapes of suggestive colors” on the world. I’ve created a monster. I’m the designer who first created the colorful blob book cover. You know the ones: the vaguely egg-like, kidney-bean-like dollops of pastels and bright millennial hues that have...

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: “Girl”...

Jayne Anne Phillips exploded onto the American literary landscape with Black Tickets, a short story collection that remains so compellingly singular that it ought to function as a handbook for short story writers. It was published in 1979, but I didn’t know of it or read any of its electric stories until some 25 years later. I was in my twenties and...

TODAY: In 1880, Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary, dies.  Jonathan Corcoran on the teacher who showed him that writing begins far from the page: Pulitzer Prize winner Jayne Anne Phillips. | Lit Hub Criticism Elizabeth Graver remembers her friend and agent, Richard Parks: “Richard’s voice on the phone was always much as I remembered it:...

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights; season three, the Hebrew...

The oldest single living organism is a creosote bush named King Clone in the Mojave Desert. Radiocarbon dating and yearly growth measurements estimate the bush to be over 11,700 years old. Creosote is a type of flowering bush with three-tooth leaves, a scrubby shrub common in southwestern deserts in North America. Several indigenous tribes in the southwestern...