Long Before Toy Story, It-Narratives Imagined the Inner Lives of Objects: It’s nighttime in the playroom and the toys have gathered for a conference. For modern audiences, this scene likely evokes the imaginative world of Toy Story, the long-running film franchise… #CraftandCriticism #Features

Help, My Writing Group Think My Latest Story Was Really Funny: It Wasn’t Meant to Be: Hello again, gentle readers! Welcome back to another delightful installment of everyone’s favorite bimonthly drunken advice column, Am I the Literary Asshole? It’s a column… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

The Letter Doula: How to Help a Life Arrive on the Page: For years, I believed people avoided letter writing because they lacked time. But after teaching leadership, communication, and storytelling to thousands of students, I’ve come to believe something else… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Short But Sweet: Nine Novellas To Read In a Single Afternoon: In anticipation of the publication of my novella, American Moon, I’ve been thinking a lot about the form. Novellas are tiny in the world of books, but they’re good for readers in a self-inflicted… #CraftandCriticism #Features

5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week: Our smorgasbord of sumptuous reviews this week includes Megan Nolan on Jon Ronson’s The Castle, Kasia Boddy on William Kennedy’s Albany Trilogy, Jonathan Dee on Kurt Andersen’s The Breakup, Johanna Thomas-Corr on Meg Mason’s… #CraftandCriticism #Features

Stories From Memory: On Finding Inspiration in My Husband’s Moroccan Family: In my living room a framed photograph hangs on the wall. A man clad in balloon pants and torn white shirt tosses a wooden pitchfork full of straw into the air with athletic grace. He’s… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

A Poetry of Witness and Invention: Wallis Wilde-Menozzi on Translating Antonella Anedda: “In my poetry,” she said, “there has always been an emphasis on concrete detail, put more simply, I think I fell in love with reality….When we are interested in the world, we… #CraftandCriticism #Features

Aruni Kashyap on India’s Cockroach Youth Movement: Novelist Aruni Kashyap joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Jennifer Maritza McCauley to talk about the surprising surge of a new youth movement in India. Kashyap, the author of a new novel, How to Date a Fanatic,… #CraftandCriticism #Features

Catherine Lacey on an Antifascist Classic of Catalan Literature: Montserrat Roig’s 1972 classic of Catalan literature, Goodbye, Ramona, both opens and closes in a vivid scene of the Spanish Civil War, but if you don’t remember the exact contours of that extremely… #Biography #CraftandCriticism

7 Novels About Obsessive Athletes: Accomplishment in sports, unlike in most other areas of life, is concrete, definitive. There are winners and losers; there are rankings. This all-or-nothing dynamic lends itself to obsession. The narrator of my debut novel, Daytona… #CraftandCriticism #Features

Translation as a Journey: Jessica Sequeira on Vlady Kociancich’s The Eighth Wonder: Along with her novels, Vlady Kociancich worked on a translation of Joseph Conrad’s The End of the Tether, which according to her obituary by Daniel Gigena in La Nación, “había sido muy… #CraftandCriticism #Features

S. Shakthidharan on Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha: The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast features a series of conversations with past and present Windham-Campbell Prize winners about their favorite books and plays. Hosted by Michael Kelleher. Mike chats with S.… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Rachel Cusk, Liane Moriarty, Jill Lepore, and more: 20 new books out today!: We’ve all been reading about it for months, and now finally it’s time to read the thing itself: Life of M by Rachel Cusk is available today! And that’s not all: a long awaited sequel… #CraftandCriticism #LiteraryCriticism

Agnes Callard on Socrates’ Turf: Welcome to Season Four of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of the Interview. This season, host Merve Emre talks with professional interviewers of all kinds about how they get the answer they’re looking for, what makes a good #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Dorthe Nors on Striving to Write Emotionally Resonant Fiction: I published my first novel twenty-five years ago. It was not a masterpiece, but to me it was a miracle. Unboxing was still a private phenomenon back then and I remember looking at the book in… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Fiction as a Filter: On Writing the American West’s Water Crisis: Years ago, during the Great Recession, I attended an event sponsored by an environmental organization that had formed in protest to a planned dam construction project on the Cache La Poudre River… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Christelle Dabos on Empathy, Doing Good, and How We Fill Ourselves Up: It’s Sunday morning, September 18, 2016. I spent the previous day signing books in Lille, in northern France. My head is still foggy. I am making myself a cup of hot chocolate when, at the… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

A Literary Haunting: What the Ghost of Sylvia Plath Taught Me About Grief: Before the ghost of Sylvia Plath haunted the yellow house on the bluff in my novel White Rabbit, she haunted me. I was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student plagued by the loss of my… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Television to the Rescue! Camille Acker on the Craft Potential of TV: This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. I have always loved television, but as a kid, television was the “idiot box.” According to experts, this device could… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week: Anjet Daanje’s The Song of Stork and Dromedary, Joby Warrick’s The Jackal, and Dorthe Nors’ Range all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s… #CraftandCriticism #Features