Literature

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘In the Desert’ is a poem by the American author Stephen Crane (1871-1900), published in his 1895 collection, The Black Riders and Other Lines. Crane is perhaps best-known for his American Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, and this is his best-remembered poem. ‘In the Desert’ is

The following is a story from Mai Nardone’s debut collection Welcome Me to the Kingdom. Nardone is a Thai and American writer whose work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He lives in Bangkok. PEA & NAM (1974)  Pea jams a match under the burner. (In English: “Ignite!”) He

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’ is a 1977 essay by the American poet Audre Lorde (1934-92). In the essay, Lorde argues that poetry is a necessity for women, as it puts them in touch with old feelings and ways of knowing which they have long forgotten. Poetry also offers

February 14, 2023, 11:21am Here’s something fun I learned today: much like poor unfortunate Tessie Hutchinson at the close of “The Lottery“—the (second?) most famous short story in New Yorker history—all Shirley Jackson Award finalists get stoned. Now, when I say “stoned,” I’m not talking about blazing up a fat, celebratory doobie of sweet Mary

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘A Rose for Emily’ is a classic American short story with an unsettling denouement on the final page. In just a dozen pages, William Faulkner’s narrator conjures an ageing matriarch of the Old South, telling us about her life, her love, and her death. The setting of ‘A Rose

February 14, 2023, 4:55am Clear your schedules! This week, we see the publication of new books by Zadie Smith, Greta Thunberg, Alejandro Zambra, and more! * Zadie Smith, The Wife of Willesden(Penguin) “A triumph of dramatic creativity … a total delight. Highly recommended.”–Library Journal Greta Thunberg, The Climate Book(Penguin Press) “Thunberg gathers essays from scientists,

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Désirée’s Baby’, originally known by the longer title ‘The Father of Désirée’s Baby’, is an 1893 short story by the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-94). It is among Chopin’s most widely studied stories, partly because it deals with the subject of race as well as gender. The story tells

February 13, 2023, 2:52pm Last week an earthquake struck Turkey and Syria. As an agent and translator who works with international writers and publishers, I began to hear from many of my colleagues, so I decided to write a message to them.  When I started writing the letter below, the earthquake’s death toll was at

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is an 1892 short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. A powerful study of mental illness and the inhuman treatments administered in its name, the story is narrated in the first person by an unnamed woman who is incarcerated in the nursery room of

Shallow, fake, showy, and performative—these are a few of the adjectives used to describe BookTok, the corner of TikTok where young women share and discuss books on camera, by drive-by tourists to a culture they don’t understand. I’m no BookTok tourist. I’ve lived here for nine months. As a chronically online millennial, I’ve become a

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The American poet Amanda Gorman was born in 1998, and when she was still in her early twenties she was reading her poetry in front of an audience of millions: she has performed her poems at US presidential inaugurations and at the Super Bowl, watched by nearly 100 million

The following is excerpted from Nikole Hannah-Jones’s preface to The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. The 1619 Project was originally launched at The New York Times Magazine in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. Below, Hannah-Jones tells the story of the fights—among historians and politicians—that the project provoked, including the

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘America’ is a 1921 poem by Claude McKay (1889-1948), a Jamaican-American poet who is often regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. In ‘America’, McKay offers an ambivalent and deeply critical appraisal of the United States of America in the 1920s. Let’s go through the poem

February 10, 2023, 10:34am Today, in casting news that just feels right: Kristen Stewart will be starring as Susan Sontag in a biopic based on  Benjamin Moser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 biography Sontag: Her Life and Work. Kristen Stewart is no stranger to biopics, having starred, most recently, as Princess Diana in 2021’s Spencer as well as 2009’s The Runaways (as Joan

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Acrostic poems are great fun to read. They may be even more fun to write. Many of the best and most famous acrostic poems in the English language were poems written for a particular recipient, whose name is ‘hidden’ within the poem. So, how is this achieved? What is

TODAY: In 1963, Sylvia Plath dies.    Booksellers from The Strand remember the coolest celebrity “cart shark” of them all: Television frontman Tom Verlaine. | Lit Hub Bookstores & Libraries Food as sustenance and political metaphor: How White House dinners shape presidential policy. | Lit Hub Politics “Will this book, like so many cultural products made by creatives of

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ is a 1953 short story by Roald Dahl (1916-90), which was initially rejected for publication but was later adapted for television on several occasions. Included in Dahl’s collections Someone Like You (1953) and Tales of the Unexpected (1979), the story is about a wife who