Literature

After the number three, seven is perhaps the number that is filled the most religious significance around the world. There are seven deadly sins, seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, seven virtues, seven arts and sciences (comprising the quadrivium and trivium), and seven ages of man. Of course, there are seven days in the week,

April 9, 2021, 10:26am The New York Public Library has announced its finalists for the twenty-first annual Young Lions Fiction Award, which is given each year to an American writer age 35 or younger for a work of fiction. The finalists were chosen by committee of writers, editors, and librarians; the winner, who will receive

April 9, 2021, 11:02am In a 1974 interview with Michael Parkinson, Orson Welles sat in a big leather chair, smoking a big ol’ cigar, and discussed his “very close friend” Ernest Hemingway. “We had a very strange relationship,” he explained. “I never belonged to his clan, because I made fun of him. And nobody ever made

‘The Student’ is a short story by Anton Chekhov, published in 1894. It’s one of his shortest stories, running to just a few pages, and – in keeping with many of Chekhov’s best short stories, very little happens in the way of plot. Yet Chekhov himself considered ‘The Student’ his favourite of all his short

TODAY: In 1925, The Great Gatsby is published. “I imagine you might still remember his name, since the 1978 season was all his.” Haruki Murakami on the magical year that Dave Hilton debuted for the Yakult Swallows. | Lit Hub Sports “I don’t think this discussion about grabbing the reader is really about attention spans. I think it’s about art,

April 9, 2021, 12:58pm Today, April 9th, marks the fifty-eight publication anniversary of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Perhaps the most beloved children’s book of the latter half of the 20th century, Sendak’s gorgeously-illustrated tale of a young boy in a wolf suit who, upon being sent to bed with no supper, is transported

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews James Raven’s erudite and informative history of that ubiquitous invention, the book In the Exeter Book, one of the jewels in the crown of Anglo-Saxon literature, a riddle appears which begins: Some enemy deprived me of my lifeAnd took away my worldly strength,

April 9, 2021, 1:01pm Tomorrow, we celebrate the 174th birthday of Joseph Pulitzer, now most well-known for establishing the Pulitzer Prizes with his endowment to Columbia University. But in his time, he was an elected Democratic congressman from New York fighting corruption, and the publisher of the New York World newspaper—a job so stressful he

April 8, 2021, 1:20pm If you’re a Lord of the Rings fan and have three minutes to spare, please spare them to contribute to an oral history of Tolkien fandom! Building on Marquette University’s extensive J.R.R. Tolkien Collection, which includes original Tolkien documents and manuscripts, Marquette’s Department of Special Collections has created the J.R.R. Tolkien

Poetry and magic share a curious history, since shamans and priests of ancient times would chant verses and incantations as part of their rituals designed to heal the sick, influence the weather, or appeal to the gods. So we might even say there is something peculiarly ‘magical’ about poetry. Below, we introduce ten of the

April 8, 2021, 10:41am Today, the Center for Fiction announced that after an extensive national search, Traci Lester has been named as the organization’s next Executive Director. Lester comes to the Center for Fiction from the National Dance Institute, where she served as Executive Director from 2016 until this March; Lester also spent over a

April 7, 2021, 2:31pm It’s William Wordsworth’s 251st birthday today, and we’re celebrating by taking a look at people who didn’t like him. (Why not?) For someone who had such wonder and amazement in his heart for, say, a mountain, Wordsworth was not a warm guy; he said of himself that as a child he

To be ‘between Scylla and Charybdis’ is, if you will, to be caught between a rock and a hard place – in other words, between two equally unappealing dangers or prospects. But how did the phrase come into being? What are its origins, and who on earth were Scylla and Charybdis? In the latest in

April 7, 2021, 12:35pm This morning, the brilliant Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai, Lightning Rods, and Some Trick, posted a devastating Twitter thread to which many, many people in America can, unfortunately, probably relate: DeWitt had a medical emergency in December which resulted in a bill of over $6,000. DeWitt went on to say

April 6, 2021, 5:21pm I’ve always been a fan of Tom Waits. But I was a huge fan of Tom Waits in my late teens and early twenties when his whiskey-soaked romanticism, all burnt-out and busted, was soundtrack to my fantasies of life on the down-and-out. And how did I arrive at these fantasies? By

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published in 1950, was the first of the seven Chronicles of Narnia to be published. The book became an almost instant classic, although its author, C. S. Lewis, reportedly destroyed the first draft after he received harsh criticism on it from his friends and fellow fantasy writers, including