Literature

March 1, 2023, 8:45am The new celebrity vodka is a celebrity-owned bookshop, I think. Take it from Judy Blume, who owns and runs Books & Books with her husband in Key West, and has thus been granted a birds’ eye view of our consumption patterns. Blume spoke to The Atlantic’s Amy Weiss-Meyer recently, and noted

Poetry is something we learn to appreciate from a very young age, even if we don’t know it by that name. Nursery rhymes are often the first ‘poems’ we learn as kids or young children, while nonsense verse, and the works of some of the more celebrated children’s authors of the last hundred years, remain

February 28, 2023, 12:48pm We English majors are not even dead and The New Yorker has moved to bury us. Nathan Heller reports in a new article that enrollment in English programs has dropped precipitously at universities across the nation as people pursue STEM and amorphous “business” classes. The causes cited in the article are,

‘The Werewolf’ is one of the shortest stories in Angela Carter’s 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber. This collection is notable for its feminist take on traditional fairy tales, and ‘The Werewolf’ is no exception. The story tells of a young girl who injures a wolf on the way to visit her grandmother in the forest,

TODAY: In 1973, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is published.    Willard Spiegelman on pinning down the biography of poet Amy Clampitt, a Patron Saint of Late Bloomers. | Lit Hub Biography 11 new books to fill those longer daylight hours. | The Hub When reanimating corpses was all the rage: Sally Adee recounts the early

Although it was a short-lived literary movement, imagism left a long legacy on poetry. Between 1914 and 1917, four annual anthologies of imagist poems appeared, beginning with Des Imagistes, edited by the movement’s founder, Ezra Pound. Pound had come up with the name ‘imagism’ while sitting in the British Museum tea rooms in London, with

February 27, 2023, 3:11pm Sigh. Let’s dig in. At 8:00 a.m. EST, The Cut published the online version of New York Magazine‘s newest print cover story, a longform reported piece from Matthew Schneier called “Life After Food,” about a new weight-loss fad involving the injectable diabetes drug Ozempic. Ozempic, the brand-name for the medication semaglutide,

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, beginning ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ is one of the best-known poems in all of English literature. The poem is often viewed as a love lyric, but can alternatively be interpreted as a poem about the power of poetry to immortalise the human subject of the poem. However we

February 27, 2023, 8:31am Celebrities with good taste in literature: you truly love to see it. This week Michael Imperioli (of The Sopranos, and White Lotus, and also the stupidly under-watched, hysterical This Fool fame), posted a cool literary selfie, with the caption: “the genius poet EILEEN MYLES sent me their new volume A WORKING

‘Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.’ So wrote Vladimir Nabokov, who, as well as being a giant of twentieth-century literature, was also a notable lepidopterist or butterfly-collector. But perhaps, even more than Nabokov, it was the Romantic poet John Keats who made the case for a deep-rooted connection between the

Poets have long defined Ukraine. In the year since Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukrainian poets have helped to share with the world not only the country’s rich textual tradition, but also what is worth fighting for: children’s futures, self determination, the “freedom to rest in a land of love,” as Iya Kiva wrote in a poem

‘The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship’ is a 1968 short story by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014). The story, which consists of one long sentence, tells of a mysterious ocean liner which appears near a coastal village one night every March. As with much of the fiction of writer Gabriel García Márquez,

February 24, 2023, 10:00am Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Ed Park’s long awaited second novel Same Bed Different Dreams, which will be published by Random House this fall. Here’s a bit about the novel from the publisher: March, 1919. Far-flung Korean patriots establish the Korean Provisional Government to protest the Japanese occupation

Free verse has become a dominant form of poetry in the hundred and fifty-odd years since it was pioneered in the United States by Walt Whitman, whose ground-breaking collection Leaves of Grass first appeared in 1855. Poems written in free verse tend to reject rhyme and regular metre or rhythm, line lengths may vary from

February 24, 2023, 11:12am Amid food shortages that Farmer MacGregor would despair of, Great Britons were this week urged to “cherish the specialisms that we have in this country” by UK environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey, who insisted to parliament that there were turnips enough to go around, what’s everyone fussing about, have a dig, won’t

Christian poetry is almost as old as Christianity itself. Early Christian hymns even helped to establish rhyme as a common feature of poetry (much earlier, pre-Christian poetry was unrhymed), and the impact of Christianity on the world of verse has been considerable. Indeed, the Christian faith has inspired some of the greatest devotional poems and

TODAY: In 1983, Tennessee Williams dies at 71.    “Take the letters. / Take only what you can carry.” Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky on contemporary Ukrainian poetry. | Lit Hub Ukraine In actually good nature news, certain populations of whales are rebounding. What can we learn from their recoveries? | Lit Hub Nature A brief history

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘All Summer in a Day’ is a 1954 short story by Ray Bradbury (1920-2012). The story is set on Venus, where the sun only comes out once every seven years for a couple of hours; the rest of the time, the sun is hidden behind clouds and rains fall