Literature

TODAY: In 1867, Marx’s Das Kapital is published.   Series creator David Milch explains all that filthy language—delivered in iambic pentamer—in Deadwood. | Lit Hub Film & TV “The silence I’m looking for is not so much a quality of sound as a state of mind.” Kamila Shamsie on finding the perfect writing space. | Lit Hub Why revere

September 30, 2022, 12:33pm That’s the same perilous American wilderness that almost killed Leonardo DiCaprio, except 200 years younger, sprier and, one would assume, significantly more bear-ful. Now, I don’t know how many bears feature in three-time National Book Award finalist, Guggenheim fellow, and winner of the Story Prize Lauren Groff’s fifth novel, The Vaster

‘Eleven’ is a short story by the American writer Sandra Cisneros (born 1954). In the story, a girl’s eleventh birthday is ruined when her teacher forces her to take responsibility for somebody else’s sweater. The narrator bursts into tears in front of her classmates and laments the fact that she isn’t older. You can read

TODAY: In 1924, Truman Capote is born.    Who could win the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature? Who should? | Lit Hub Lena Dunham adapts a classic childhood text, the Westworld creators take on William Gibson, and three (!) vampire stories get the screen treatment in the Literary Film and TV You Need to Stream in

September 29, 2022, 2:27pm The Rumors are true! Yesterday, Lizzo became the first and only person on the planet to play this centuries’ old (!) crystal (!!) flute. It’s About Damn Time. This instrument is from 1813, and it belonged to our fourth President, James Madison, so yeah, you could say it’s pretty Special. Give

September 29, 2022, 11:01am Hundreds of authors have signed a letter released today by Fight for the Future, a nonprofit group that addresses digital rights issues, to express support for libraries’ open access to digital books and for protecting their right to lend books in all formats. The letter calls for “[enshrining] the right of

September 28, 2022, 2:53pm There’s no shortage of reasons to love libraries, and here’s another: a new survey from the UK shows a significant number of them are planning to serve as “warm banks” this winter for people who need to take shelter from the cold. Sarah Shaffi reports today for The Guardian that, from

If, as the old quip has it, Hamlet is a great play but it has too many quotations in it, a similar charge might be laid against Macbeth, one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. So many lines in the play have become proverbial and are often quoted outside of the context of the play itself.

September 28, 2022, 10:13am TIME published its list of the 100 most influential people of 2022 today, and it includes eight writers from across the worlds of poetry, literary fiction, playwriting, journalism, and academia. Here’s what their peers had to say about them, and you can find the full list here. Sally Rooney, novelist “It’s

September 27, 2022, 11:17am Tom Hanks—who previously spent time crushing a beloved indie bookstore with his discount big box chain (which was then probably crushed by Amazon and yes I am talking about his role in You’ve Got Mail and not his real life)—will publish a novel with Knopf this spring. The book, The Making of Another Major

September 27, 2022, 10:44am Pull on your cozy reading sweats already! This week, we’re getting new books by Namwali Serpell, Kate Atkinson, Annie Proulx, Hua Hsu, and more. * Namwali Serpell, The Furrows(Hogarth Press) “Its ambiguities and enigmas add up to not more eddying confusions but to a stark reminder that the only reasonable response

September 26, 2022, 11:42am Do you enjoy gambling—but, you know, in a cultured way? None of that racetrack nonsense or three card monte for you? Well you’re in luck: the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced next Thursday, October 6, and the bookies have begun taking bets. (You know literary prize season has

‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ is one of the best-known short stories by Flannery O’Connor (1925-64), who produced a string of powerful stories during her short life. First published in the collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find in 1955, the story is about an American family who run into an escaped

September 26, 2022, 9:42am Why the hell has Pennsylvania’s Central York School District banned four books in the Girls Who Code series, which provides models to young women and girls who might not otherwise see themselves as computer programmers? Yes, the nationwide Republican movement to ban books is repugnant and cruel and deeply hypocritical, but

Artist/Tolkien devotee Jenna Kass and TV Critic/fantasy philistine Dylan Roth are a married couple who have joined forces to review the new Amazon Prime original series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Can this latest on-screen voyage to Middle-earth satisfy both a die-hard with the wisdom of the Eldar and your average

TODAY: In 1862, Leo Tolstoy marries Sophia Andreyevna Behrs.  Sample the Toronto International Film Festival’s literary offerings, featuring the latest Brontë biopic and Ottessa Moshfegh’s best work yet (?). | Lit Hub Film Mario Vargas Llosa considers “the invisible work” wrought by Juan Gabriel Vázquez’s novel of never-ending war, Looking Back. | Lit Hub Criticism