#lithub

[thoughtportal]

HarperCollins is selling their authors’ work to AI tech.

On Friday, author Daniel Kibblesmith posted a series of screenshots on Bluesky in order to share a concerning email he received from the age

[lesbianmarrow]

Navigating Preteendom in the Shadow of the American Girl Doll

On September 1, 1998, my girlhood abruptly changed its shape. Two things happened on that blustery back-to-school morning that fell exactly

“Taking care of your body is a lifelong job,” reads the Twentieth Anniversary Edition of The Care and Keeping of You. “Puberty is a special time of growth and change. Everybody goes through it. It begins for most girls between the ages of 8 and 13,” narrates Emily Woo Zeller in the audiobook script of the book, “and it ends when your body has reached its adult height and size”—here, thirty-six-year-old me bursts into rueful and angry laughter—“around ages 15 to 17.” To teach eleven-year-old girls, in no uncertain terms, that our high school bodies are our adult bodies may promote a certain “keeping” of ourselves, alright—a vigilance, a border and the implied violence of its maintenance, a tight control by any methods those oft-mentioned “trusted adults” may prescribe—but confidence, self-celebration, care? My thirty-year-old body, an ocean of cellulite and stretch marks and therapy undertaken to unlearn those very same methods of “keeping” between it and its seventeen-year-old iteration, shakes its head.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Renee Nicole Good, murdered by ICE, was a prize-winning poet. Here’s that poem.

Renee Nicole Good, 37, mother to a six-year-old boy, was murdered earlier today by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, a few blocks from her home.

Renee Nicole Good, 37, mother to a six-year-old boy, was murdered earlier today by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, a few blocks from her home. According to the Minnesota Star Tribune:

[An ICE agent] shot and killed a woman in south Minneapolis during a morning confrontation between community members and federal officers […] Several residents of the area who witnessed the scene said agents were ordering the woman out of the vehicle. A video showed agents around the vehicle as the driver reversed and then pulled forward. One agent appeared to fire multiple rounds into the car.

The bio from a now-private Instagram account belonging to Good describes her as a “Poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado; experiencing Minneapolis, MN.” In 2020, when she went by Renée Nicole Macklin, she won the prestigious Academy of American Poets Prize for a poem called “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” which begins:

i want back my rocking chairs, solipsist sunsets, & coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores (mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp— the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

[READ THE FULL POEM HERE]

This is murder in broad daylight by the Trump administration, obvious and brutal. And though each senseless act of violence committed by the state upon its citizens echoes the thousands that have gone before, we cannot become numb to the particular (and intensifying) depravities of this administration.

So if the violence of the deportations, and the crackdowns, and the cuts, and the raids, and the air strikes, haven’t been enough for you, let something so simple and evil as the daytime execution of a poet move you to action.

UPDATE: Head here to donate in support of Renee’s wife and son.

[all-the-things-2020]

This was featured on LitHub today:

Shakespeare and Fanfiction - JSTOR Daily

Despite an enduring slice of audience that treats his work as precious and mythic, most Shakespeare fans have rarely met an adaptive concept

Never feel ashamed of writing (or reading) fan fic.

[noodledesk]

The Best [advice]: The best writing advice I ever received was in a fortune cookie that said: “the work teaches you how to do it.” The work, the art, whatever you wish to create, is the best teacher—an organizing intelligence begins to reveal itself only when you start writing. So get to work! The second best writing advice is Goethe’s “do not hurry; do not rest.” 

Naheed Phiroze Patel, 10 Asian American writers on the best (and worst) advice they’ve ever received. (by Katie Yee)

[flippyspoon]

[charliejaneanders]

So grateful to Lithub for including Lessons in Magic and Disaster in its list of the most anticipated books of 2025! "Should be a total delight for the late summer, one-more-book-before-back-to-school days."

[shakespearenews]

What Teaching Shakespeare Taught Me About Writing Horror

A desolate moor, haunted by incomprehensible supernatural beings. Chains rattling in a dark castle, ghosts prowling the ramparts. A grisly corpse, hands chopped off and tongue sliced out. For any h…

In fact, after more than a decade of teaching his work, I’ve come to see Shakespeare—at least when he’s writing tragedies—as primarily a horror writer. He might perhaps be the most significant influence in the entire English language to the Gothic, and consequently the modern, horror tradition.

Seen through the lens of a horror writer, Shakespeare’s progression as an artist is not just in his ability to play with structure, form, and character, but rather that he gains a deeper understanding of how to really scare people. As he grew as a writer, he learned there are better ways to emotionally wound an audience than the surface kills and thrills, and it’s this that ends up really defining him as a playwright.