Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode, Andrew talks to Say One Kind Thing author Susan Verde about positive self-talk, self-acceptance and how mindfulness can heal the trauma
Literature
‘Young Goodman Brown’ is an 1835 short story by the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Inspired in part by the Salem witch craze of 1692, the story deals with a number of key themes. But what are the most prominent themes of Hawthorne’s story, and how should we approach and interpret their significance? Let’s take a
March 14, 2023, 11:13am A man so upset by the Pride programming at his local libraries that he felt moved to graffiti “GROOMERS” onto the windows has been charged with possession of child pornography, the Washington Post reports. The man, Charles M. Sutherland, vandalized two branches in Maryland’s Prince George’s County, after “expressing his disdain
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The American poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) once remarked that poems are ‘like dreams’ because ‘in them you put what you don’t know you know’. Into her own poetry, Rich would put her own experiences, as well as the experiences of other women (when she won the 1974 National Book
March 13, 2023, 5:39pm Your monetary policy daddy, Fed Chair Jerome Powell, just bailed out Silicon Valley Bank after investors found that their money had slipped through a sidewalk grate while the titans of Silicon Valley weren’t watching. Whoops! Sometimes people find themselves up a tree and in need of the Fed’s ability to prop a
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The phrase ‘the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’ is associated with the New Testament, and specifically with the writings of St Paul. But what does St Paul mean when he declares that ‘the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’? What letter, and why does it kill?
March 13, 2023, 1:20pm As you may recall, back in January of 2022, after much speculation and an industrywide manhunt, a Tom Ripley-esque rights coordinator by the name of Filippo Bernardini was arrested at JFK airport for the extremely strange crime of impersonating literary agents and book publishers. Between 2016 and his arrest, Bernardini impersonated
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Quatrains are found in some of the best-known poems in the English language (and in other languages, too). From border ballads to contemporary poems, the quatrain – a four-line unit or stanza – has proved useful to many poets over the centuries. Quatrains can be unrhymed, but when they
The following first appeared in Lit Hub’s The Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. One day, in the midst of working on my first novel in English, I was overwhelmed by a wave of frustration with my adopted language. With some fury, I knocked this out on the page and decided not to translate it: 我说我爱你，你说你爱自由。 为什么自由比爱更重要。没有爱，自由是赤裸裸的一片世界。
By Dr Oliver Tearle To be ‘submissive’ is to submit: to yield obediently to some higher or greater power or authority, and allow oneself to be dominated by that higher power. So people are sometimes described as having a submissive personality or behaving in a submissive way. (The word submit is from Latin words meaning
1.Read a miniature abridged Little Women by flashlight. Snuggle under thick quilts during a summer storm, deep in the pine-scented woods on Maine. As rain clatters onto the log cabin’s roof, whisper the sisters’ names: Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. 2.Grow up with Jo. Return every summer vacation to this book and take stock of
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The poems of Anne Sexton (1928-74) have not, perhaps, received their full due. As Michael Schmidt notes in his compendious Lives of the Poets, Sexton’s work has come to be viewed as a ‘footnote’ to the work of the much better-known Sylvia Plath, who was influenced by Sexton’s work.
March 10, 2023, 12:16pm Listen… can you hear the denim moving across a stage in California, the swish of gelled hair? S.E. Hinton’s beloved novel The Outsiders has been adapted into a musical at La Jolla Playhouse, with solid reviews following the open. If you haven’t pawed at a paperback of The Outsiders since adolescence,
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 short story ‘Young Goodman Brown’ is now regarded as one of his greatest works of short fiction. This powerful tale about good and evil, Puritanism and temptation, is full of revealing quotations which help to put across the story’s overarching ‘message’. Let’s take a closer look at some of the quotations from
TODAY: In 1744, English auction house Sotheby’s holds its first ever auction (of books) in London. (Pictured above is a 1888 Sotheby’s book auction.) Geoffrey D. Morrison on the mundane letters of John Keats. | Lit Hub Criticism Jenny Jackson, longtime editor turned debut author, describes the growing pains of switching roles. | Lit
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Picking the ‘most famous poems’ ever written is always going to be tricky. For one thing, it varies from country to country, culture to culture, language to language. So we’d best lay down some justifications for our decisions before we offer our pick of twenty of the most famous
March 10, 2023, 12:36pm Gone are the days when you could write a book a chapter at a time and hook people in a slow, serial burn. Now, if the internet is to believed, one must amass 100,000 followers on social media before they can even be considered for a book deal (every writer ever:
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ is Martin Luther King’s most famous written text, and rivals his most celebrated speech, ‘I Have a Dream’, for its political importance and rhetorical power. King wrote this open letter in April 1963 while he was imprisoned in the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama. When