SkyFree Chronicles

Fewer words, harder work: why the short story's compression, merciless endings, and lack of slack make it the most demanding form in fiction.

Yiyun Li’s Music Against the Night, Shawn Gude’s American Socialist, Bonnie Garmus’s Peck & Peck, and Lieke Marsman’s On Another Planet They Can Save Me all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s

When I first learned about Duanfang—my infamous, assassinated ancestor—I thought his story was a myth my family liked to tell—our version of the Grimm fairytales. It seemed improbable that my great-great-great grandfather was a prominent Manchu politician, had founded a

We probably already have the definitive film about an artist for this decade, in Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day. The idiosyncratic biopic makes the right choices, giving us in a sliver of time the dailiness of a working life with

The tenth anniversary edition of Peter Brown’s middle grade novel The Wild Robot is available now from Little Brown Book for Young Readers, so we asked him a few questions about reading aloud, feedback from young readers, and reasons to be

If you read this column at, you have caught me referencing the incredible literary podcast Between the Covers. It’s a delight to have its host, the inimitable David Naimon, as a guest to celebrate the reissue of Ursula K. Le

Bogs are big right now. Fashion designers are dipping couture in peat; memes on Instagram offer help choosing your bog witch name. Internationally bestselling authors are (figuratively) mining wetlands for inspiration. The bog and its cousins the swamp and marsh

Last weekend I had a little stagefright before I was set to appear on a panel about authorship and AI for an event called Whose Truth? Writers and Readers Forum presented by the Authors Guild. I had a feeling I’d

Each day, I write the poem of my body. The more I’m able to befriend movement as a means to learn what knowledge lives within, the more interesting my experience becomes. What poem might my body write today? Poems are

Vauhini Vara, who has for years been investigating the impact of AI on writing, published a piece in The Atlantic over the weekend claiming that the winner of The Caine Prize used AI to write his story. Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe

The Author is facing the sea, his cheeks orange from the lowering sun. There’s Maja, walking towards him, from behind, tentative, yet her right arm is reaching for him, reaching around him. No sound except the waves, they break against

As a kid, I got easily spooked. We lived on the edge of a creaking, bubbling, swampy-dark woods; at night, my mom sang “The Unquiet Grave,” a haunting folksong where a young woman begs her dead lover to speak to

The Center For Fiction welcomed Pulitzer Prize-winning author Adam Johnson (The Orphan Master’s Son) to The Center for Fiction this fall to celebrate the release of his new novel, The Wayfinder. This must-read novel urges us to consider how struggles

When I taught poetry, I always arrived with pencils, pieces of paper, and a printed out poem by Frank O’Hara. If my students, middle schoolers forced to cram into libraries and over-filled classrooms, had heard of any poets before, O’Hara

Elizabeth Zott, the feisty 1960s-era chemist in Bonnie Garmus’ mega-selling first novel Lessons in Chemistry, captivated readers with her early feminist point of view and transformative approach to hosting a TV cooking series. Batter Gray, an aspiring poet from Yuba

The first summer after my daughter died, I received an email invitation to give a keynote address the next spring. I didn’t know the scholar who invited me, but she’d been told that my daughter had recently died and offered

It began when I heard a sentence: “He wanted to talk again, suddenly.” The words cut sharply into the jumble of to-do lists, fantasies, snippets of possible writing, worry, and leftover traces of postpartum depression that constituted my mind in

Cross-stitch watercolor by Demetris Papadimitropoulos When Aly changed hir name, hir mother heard more than a new set of syllables. Margaret told researchers in Rin Reczek and Emma Bosley-Smith’s study that she felt Aly had “divorced the whole family.” Before

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. In 2006, when I started writing the book that would eventually become my debut novel The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, I shared my first, tentative pages with a

Jean Echenoz’s Jérôme Lindon recounts, in sixty spare, affectionate, sometimes lightly barbed pages, the twenty-year relationship that its author enjoyed with his publisher, a legend of the French literary establishment. The story begins in 1979 with an unexpected summons to

Forty years ago in October 1986 I attended my first Frankfurt Book Fair. On the first day of meetings my friend and colleague Gary Fisketjon and I were introduced to Heinrich Maria Ledig Rowohlt, an elegant, charismatic 78-year-old German publisher

Hello again! Welcome back to the finest (and drunkest) corner of the internet, home of the darling and daring sensation known as Am I the Literary Asshole? If you’re a first time reader, we’re a bimonthly advice column that tackles

Today, the Swedish Academy awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature to Canadian author Anne Carson, for “her bold and inventive oeuvre that in playful dialogue with the classical tradition has created new forms for contemporary literature.” The Academy’s permanent