Literature

CHARLES BUKOWSKI MEETS HENRY ROLLINS–AMAZON     A candid conversation with   acclaimed short-story writer   Adam Kluger Q: What creative endeavors have you been up to? Kluger: Just trying to keep my chin up. It’s been a challenging time for everybody. But the short stories and the artwork (Dreck)  come when they come and that’s

Melissa A. Crane, DC, MS, HHP Announces the Release of The House: The Truth of Who You Are Lives Within You The best experiences we have in life have been created in our hearts, with the help of our imaginations…   Genre: Nonfiction, Self-Love, Self-Help, Empowerment, Spiritual, Reinventing Date Published: August 8, 2021 In a

August 9, 2021, 3:10pm If you think the sweet release of death will deliver you from your obligation to start a podcast, think again. Jack Kerouac—who, if he were alive, would absolutely have gone on Joe Rogan by now—will soon return to us in podcast form. The author’s estate is partnering with writers and hosts

Lady Macbeth’s speech beginning ‘We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we’ll not fail’ comes at the end of Act 1 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Lady Macbeth’s words come just after she has taunted her husband for his perceived lack of manliness, because he is now vacillating and having second thoughts about

August 9, 2021, 7:05am Electric Literature has announced their new editor-in-chief: Denne Michele Norris, formerly a Senior Fiction Editor at The Rumpus and Fiction Editor at Apogee Journal, and cohost of the popular, NYT-lauded podcast Food 4 Thot. According to a press release, in her role at Electric Literature, Norris will be the first Black

August 6, 2021, 10:37am Truman Capote never finished his last novel. He signed a contract for the book, which he described as a “dark comedy of the very rich” and compared to In Search of Lost Time, in 1966 (and renegotiated it twice, somehow getting more money each time), but only managed to publish a

‘The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs’ is a well-known phrase, derived from one of the classical writer Aesop’s best-known fables. A fable, of course, is a short story with a moral, and the story usually involves animals. ‘The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs’ fits all of these criteria. But what is the moral

August 6, 2021, 12:28pm The new wave of COVID-related novels has already infected Gary Shteyngart, Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, and Dave Eggers—and the latest writer to succumb might be Stephen King. In an appearance on The View to promote his new crime novel Billy Summers, King announced his plans to tackle COVID in novel form.

Ron Nyren’s The Book of Lost Light—winner of Black Lawrence Press’s 2019 Big Moose Prize and finalist in the 2020 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction—tells the story of Joseph Kylander, whose childhood in early 20th-century San Francisco has been shaped by his widowed father’s obsessive photographic project and by his headstrong

‘Before the Law’ is a short story or parable by the German-language Bohemian (now Czech) author Franz Kafka (1883-1924). It was published in 1915 and later included in Kafka’s (posthumously published) novel The Trial, where its meaning is discussed by the protagonist Josef K. and a priest he meets in a cathedral. ‘Before the Law’

Open Source is the world’s longest-running podcast. Christopher Lydon circles the big ideas in culture, the arts and politics with the smartest people in the world. It’s the kind of curious, critical, high-energy conversation we’re all missing nowadays. * That blood-red full moon of July looked for sure to be on fire, but only because

August 6, 2021, 1:05pm Multihyphenates can get a bad rap, accused of not committing to one thing: operating in the gig economy, creators can feel pressure to specialize. But just because many artists are canonized in one discipline doesn’t mean they didn’t work in others. For instance, before Flannery O’Connor—who died this week in 1964—was

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the famous opening sentence of Orwell’s final novel ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ Since those words were first published in 1949, they have joined the pantheon, the literary canon, of great opening lines. They

TODAY: In 1934, American Beat poet Diane di Prima is born.   “It’s as if Smith knew what was coming and wanted us to have good company.” Sara Batkie on reading Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet during the past year of COVID-19. | Lit Hub Year in Reading Lucy Jones enumerates the science-based health benefits of enjoying

‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ is an essay by T. S. Eliot; it began life as an address Eliot gave to the Shakespeare Association on 18 March 1927 before being published on 22 September of that year. Although it is Eliot’s poetry that has endured, and his reputation as a perceptive and provocative critic

August 5, 2021, 1:13pm In early 2022, the scholar collective Post45 will release a cluster of writing, helmed by guest editors Sarah Osment and David Hering, on David Berman. As Post45’s cluster structure dictates, many different thinkers’ short essays on the work of the poet and Silver Jews musician will be released together. The upcoming