A litblog (alternate: lit-blog or literary blog) is a blog that focuses primarily on the topic of literature. There is a community of litblogs in the blogosphere whose authors cover a variety of literary topics. An author of a litblog is called a 'Litblogger' and they write about fiction, nonfiction, poetry, the publishing industry, literary journals, literary criticism, and more. They may focus on special genres of literature, including science fiction and mystery. Some litbloggers prefer an objective or formal tone, while others are more conversational.
Many litblogs feature reviews of books which may or may not be featured in the mainstream press. Some litblogs feature critiques of reviews in the mainstream press. Interviews with authors are another common feature. Litblogs can also be used as virtual reading groups for focused discussion on a specific piece or pieces of literature, with some litblogs following a particular piece of literature through an entire reading, and others reprinting diaries or letters from authors. Some litblogs are resources for information about the publishing industry, publicity, or writing craft.
Many litblogs have one author, but collaborative blogs have many authors, one of whom may serve as the primary author overseeing contributors. There are also collaborative blogs focussing on significant international or national literary awards such as Read the Nobels and The Complete Booker where contributors share reviews of winning and shortlisted titles, information about award-winning authors or the history of the award. These are sometimes associated with so-called 'reading challenges' but they can become a useful repository of commentary about award winners and their books over time, especially in the case of less well-known authors. Other collaborative blogs include those focusing on the work of a single notable author such as La Comedie Humaine where members share their summaries and reviews as well as information about the French author, Honoré de Balzac.
Examples
Bookslut, Laila Lalami, The Literary Saloon, and Maud Newton are some of the oldest well-known active literary blogs. Moby Lives, one of the oldest literary blogs, was recently defunct, but has returned on the Melville House Publishing website. Litkicks, run by Levi Asher is the oldest-known literary blog of its kind and also remains active.
See also: HTML Giant, Reader of Depressing Books, No One Does That, and The Rumpus. Abandoned Books reviews books and authors not much discussed on the web any more but which were bestsellers in their day. The blog's owner, Doug Bassett, is interested in bestsellers of the past, "partly because there seems to be a real dearth of information on these authors, partly because I'm interested in what books become popular, what these authors share (or don't share)."
Bilingual literary bloggers include Book Around the Corner (France, written in English), Iris on Books (Holland, in English), Beauty is a Sleeping Cat (Switzerland, in English), Caravana de Recuerdos (bilingual Spanish/English). Some litblogs are profitable businesses while others are not run for profit. Some authors of litblogs are professional writers, academics, literature enthusiasts or industry professionals. Others are simply people who enjoy writing about books. In the democratic forum of the blogosphere, these groups can interact by reading and commenting on one another's posts.
LitBloggers have also entered the Literary Prize scene by hosting what are called Shadow Literary Prizes, which have no monetary value but offer valuable international publicity to the long and short-listed books, and provide an archive of reviews of the titles, since all the longlisted titles are reviewed by at least one member of the Shadow Jury, and all the shortlisted titles are reviewed by all members. The Shadow Giller Prize, founded in 1995, was the first of these Shadow Literary Prizes. Its origins were the inaugural Shadow Giller Lunch of literary critics and people in the publishing industry in 1995, but the concept migrated to the web in 2009. Coordinated by Kevin From Canada, who convenes a 'jury' each year, the Shadow Giller Prize Jury by consensus awards its own Shadow Prize to the book the jury prefers . In 2011, The Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize began : modelled on the Shadow Giller and coordinated by ANZ LitLovers in Australia , it also has an international jury of bloggers who commit to the same principle: to criticize a prize, a Shadow Literary Prize Jury makes its choice before the Real Jury makes its announcement.
Group litblogs continue to diversify. A group of academics runs a litblog called The Valve. The Litblog Co-op (disbanded) was a group of 20 litbloggers who voted to collectively recommend a book every three months. In the UK, six leading litblogs joined forces to create Britlitblogs.com. There have been blogs devoted to one book, like William T. Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down, and blogs that have reprinted the entire contents of Samuel Pepys' Diary and Franz Kafka's diary. Today in Letters provided letters and diary entries from each day in literary history.
Recently children's literary bloggers have organized together and brought about an entity best known as the Kidlitosphere. These bloggers include professional reviewers, booksellers, librarians, parents, homeschoolers, authors, illustrators, and anyone else concerned in the field. Some blog professionally for the online editions of print journals, like A Fuse#8 Production on School Library Journal and ShelfTalker on Publishers Weekly. Others do a regular series of interviews and reviews, including Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, Big A little a, and bookshelves of doom.
The Kidlitosphere has its own literary award it hands out once a year called The Cybils Award. They also meet once a year in October for a yearly conference.
A blog is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
The Giller Prize, is a literary award given to a Canadian author of a novel or short story collection published in English the previous year, after an annual juried competition between publishers who submit entries. The prize was established in 1994 by Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch in honour of his late wife Doris Giller, a former literary editor at the Toronto Star, and is awarded in November of each year along with a cash reward.
Canadian literature is the literature of a multicultural country, written in languages including Canadian English, Canadian French, Indigenous languages, and many others such as Canadian Gaelic. Influences on Canadian writers are broad both geographically and historically, representing Canada's diversity in culture and region.
The Trillium Book Award is an annual literary award presented to writers in Ontario, Canada. It is administered by Ontario Creates, a Crown agency of the Government of Ontario, which is overseen by the Ministry of Heritage, Sport, Tourism and Culture Industries. The monetary component for the award includes amounts paid to the author of the book and to the publisher of the book. The award has been expanded several times since its establishment in 1987: a separate award for French-language literature was added in 1994, an award for poetry in each language was added in 2003, and an award for French-language children's literature was added in 2006.
Miriam Toews is a Canadian writer and author of nine books, including A Complicated Kindness (2004), All My Puny Sorrows (2014), and Women Talking (2018). She has won a number of literary prizes including the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award for body of work. Toews is also a three-time finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a two-time winner of the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
The genre of travel literature encompasses outdoor literature, guide books, nature writing, and travel memoirs.
Thomas Mallon is an American novelist, essayist, and critic. His novels are renowned for their attention to historical detail and context and for the author's crisp wit and interest in the "bystanders" to larger historical events. He is the author of nine books of fiction, including Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman, Aurora 7, Bandbox, Fellow Travelers, Watergate, Finale, and most recently Landfall. He has also published nonfiction on plagiarism, diaries, letters and the Kennedy assassination, as well as two volumes of essays.
The Jewish Book Council, founded in 1944, is an organization encouraging and contributing to Jewish literature. The goal of the council, as stated on its website, is "to promote the reading, writing and publishing of quality English language books of Jewish content in North America". The council sponsors the National Jewish Book Awards, the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, the JBC Network, JBC Book Clubs, the Visiting Scribe series, and Jewish Book Month. It publishes an annual literary journal called Paper Brigade.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her Licence de lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005) is the debut book by Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami. It has been described as a novel, and as a linked series of short stories or fictional portraits. First published in the United States, the connected stories explore the extensive immigration from North Africa to Europe through the lives of four Moroccan characters: two men and two women.
Mark Sarvas is an American novelist, critic, and blogger living in Los Angeles. He is the host of the literary blog The Elegant Variation and author of the novel Harry, Revised. Harry, Revised was a finalist for the Fiction Prize of the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association, and was also a 2008 Denver Post Good Reads selection.
Sean Michaels is a Scottish-born novelist, music critic, and blogger. Based in Montreal, Quebec, he has written about music for publications such as The Guardian, McSweeney's, The Believer, Pitchfork, Maisonneuve, The Observer, The Wire and The National Post. His weekly music column, Heartbeats, debuted in The Globe & Mail in 2015.
Laboratoria Fantastiki, or FantLab, is a Russian website dedicated to science fiction and fantasy literature. It was founded in 2004 by Alexei Lvov.
Zukiswa Wanner is a South African journalist, novelist and editor born in Zambia and now based in Kenya. Since 2006, when she published her first book, her novels have been shortlisted for awards including the South African Literary Awards (SALA) and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. In 2015, she won the K Sello Duiker Memorial Literary Award for London Cape Town Joburg (2014). In 2014 Wanner was named on the Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define trends in African literature. In 2020 she was awarded the Goethe Medal alongside Ian McEwan and Elvira Espejo Ayca, making Wanner the first African woman to win the award.
The 2012 Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded on 16 October 2012. A longlist of twelve titles was announced on 25 July, and these were narrowed down to a shortlist of six titles, announced on 11 September. The jury was chaired by Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, accompanied by literary critics Dinah Birch and Bharat Tandon, historian and biographer Amanda Foreman, and Dan Stevens, actor of Downton Abbey fame with a background English Literature studies. The jury was faced with the controversy of the 2011 jury, whose approach had been seen as overly populist. Whether or not as a response to this, the 2012 jury strongly emphasised the value of literary quality and linguistic innovation as criteria for inclusion.
Jen Michalski is an American fiction author.
Mark Tredinnick is an Australian poet, essayist and teacher. Winner of the Montreal International Poetry Prize in 2011 and the Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 2012. He is the author of thirteen books, including four volumes of poetry ; The Blue Plateau;The Little Red Writing Book and Writing Well: the Essential Guide.
Us Conductors is a debut novel by Canadian writer Sean Michaels. Published in 2014 by Random House in Canada and Tin House in the United States, the novel is a fictionalized account of the relationship between Léon Theremin, the inventor of the theremin, and Clara Rockmore, the musician regarded as the instrument's first virtuoso player.
The Moor's Account is a novel by Laila Lalami. It was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist in 2015.
The Other Americans is a mystery novel written by Moroccan American novelist Laila Lalami. The novel was published in 2019 by Pantheon Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
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