Literature

June 21, 2022, 10:14am In Jean-Paul Sartre’s novella The Childhood of a Leader, he wrote that there is “more destructive power” in pranks “than in all the works of Lenin.” Well, maybe if you are a headmaster who finds yourself unable to control a pack of unruly existentialist (graduate) students. In 1925, when Sartre was a

June 17, 2022, 8:45am Australian novelist John Hughes—who, as The Guardian reported earlier this week, plagiarized sections of his novel The Dogs from the extremely obscure novels All Quiet on the Western Front, Anna Karenina, and The Great Gatsby—has offered a rebuttal to claim(/fact) that he is a plagiarist: No, I’m not. Hughes wrote a bizarre defense in

How did Atlas, the figure from Greek mythology, come to give his name to a book of maps? And how did he give his name to one of the most famous geographical features in the world? Let’s take a closer look at the Atlas myth. Atlas was a Titan who was punished by being made

Juneteenth is for celebration. We celebrate the vitality and creativity of Black people, individually and collectively. But it’s a complicated kind of celebration, because it asks us to recognize that America’s democracy is structured by racial caste hierarchies—a matrix of exclusions, privileges and unequal life-chances derived from ideas about racial difference, and rooted in our

June 17, 2022, 9:12am Kalani Pickhart’s novel I Will Die in a Foreign Land is the winner of this year’s Young Lions Fiction Award, given by the New York Public Library every year to a writer under 35 for a novel or short story collection. The other finalists, which were announced in April, were Mateo

June 17, 2022, 9:16am To celebrate the release of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Knopf built a real-life version of one of the games in the book. It is . . . weirdly addicting, and also weirdly fun. Especially if you grew up on Mario Teaches Typing. “EmilyBlaster is one of [character] Sadie Green’s

June 17, 2022, 9:23am This weekend is Father’s Day, and while I could recommend some World War II books you could buy last-minute, instead I’m going to recommend that you read one of the few examples we have of actually good fathering among the canonical American writers of the 20th century: a letter from John

TODAY: In 1858, Charles Darwin receives a paper by Alfred Russel Wallace that includes nearly identical conclusions about evolution as Darwin’s own, prompting Darwin to publish his theory.    Annie Proulx revisits William Golding’s 1980 novel, Rites of Passage. | Lit Hub Criticism Does Netflix’s $100 million adaptation of George Saunders’s “Escape From Spiderhead” stand

June 17, 2022, 12:36pm Honestly, I cannot believe I have not done this list yet because I (an adult) think about children’s books a lot, despite not having kids or really knowing any. (The pandemic hit before the majority of my colleagues procreated, so I have not properly bonded with their offspring at staff picnics;

What are some of the best, and best-known, short stories that feature animals? Many classic stories feature other species in prominent roles, whether it’s talking cats, dogs telling us their life stories, or primates giving academic reports at a conference (yes, really). Below, we select and introduce ten of the most iconic and famous stories

June 17, 2022, 9:53am A website called CatholicVote is telling its readers to hide books in library displays that have anything to do with the lives of queer people or people of color. This month, of course, the focus of their fragile and bigoted worldview is LGBQT+ visibility. Here’s a sample of their marching orders:

June 16, 2022, 12:08pm Finally, after months of waiting, we have footage Blonde—the hotly-anticipated Netflix movie adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ mammoth work of historical bio-fiction. [embedded content] Helmed by darkly-cerebral Australian director Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James, Mindhunter), the buzz around Blonde has been building around for a while, partly because of Ana

‘Regret’ is a short story by the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904). Chopin wrote ‘Regret’ in September 1894 and it originally appeared in Century magazine the following year, before being reprinted in her 1897 collection A Night in Acadie. This collection met with some hostile reviews, with one critic objecting to the ‘unnecessary coarseness’ of

June 16, 2022, 11:16am Vladimir Nabokov is a well-documented complainer. He’s one of the few writers I think would have been good at Twitter (sorry to almost everyone else, living or dead). Actually, he would have delegated it to Véra, who would have gotten some sort of Netflix deal out of it, probably. In any

As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr probably never said, ‘predictions are hard, especially about the future.’ And although the job of authors of science fiction and speculative fiction isn’t to make accurate predictions about what our future lives might look like, but to entertain us by tapping into current concerns, fears, dreams, and ambitions for

June 14, 2022, 1:26pm The Southern Poverty Law Center is reporting that Hatewatch has identified the principals behind Antelope Hill, a far right publisher founded in 2020 that specializes in white nationalist, fascist, Nazi publications. With a catalog ranging from newly translated Nazi-era texts to contemporary white nationalist writing, Antelope Hill has been “successful” in

‘Down at the Dinghy’ is a short story by J. D. Salinger, originally published in 1949. As in some of Salinger’s other stories, notably ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’, ‘Down at the Dinghy’ involves an adult speaking to a child. However, in this case the theme of the story – which remains largely in the

June 14, 2022, 10:41am About four months ago, I had a baby. Certainly this will not be the first time you hear that the experience of becoming a parent can come with a profound erosion of self, particularly if you’re the mother. But the weirdest part of that erosion for me has been my absolute