August 4, 2021, 2:51pm Today on Instagram, Hanya Yanagihara shared the cover of her next novel, To Paradise, which will be published by Doubleday on January 11, 2022. Yanagihara, who is not only a novelist but the editor in chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, has a well-honed aesthetic sense, and a
Literature
TODAY: In 1792, Percy Bysshe Shelley is born. “Driving around the mountain roads, I could hear the quiet around me, and it sounded like the foreboding, slinky, synthesizer-filled theme song to Twin Peaks.” Stephen Kurczy visits the “Log Lady” of the Quiet Zone. | Lit Hub American policing is operating exactly as it was designed to, writes
First published in 1899, Heart of Darkness – which formed the basis of the 1979 Vietnam war film Apocalypse Now – is one of the first recognisably modernist works of literature in English fiction. Its author was the Polish-born Joseph Conrad, and English wasn’t his first language (or even, for that matter, his second). As
August 3, 2021, 4:27pm Today is the 57th death day of Flannery O’Connor, sardonic queen of the Southern Gothic sub-genre (whose long-overlooked racist tendencies have been more widely discussed of late), devout Catholic, and lifelong ornithologist. O’Connor’s The Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction (beating John Updike’s Rabbit Redux, Walker Percy’s
TODAY: In 1887, English poet Rupert Chawner Brooke, whom W. B. Yeats reportedly described as “the handsomest young man in England,” is born. Your August literary film and TV watchlist features Hot Priest recast as Lord Merlin, Sandra Oh as the chair of an English department, some truly bonkers CGI, and more. | Lit
‘Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have / Immortal longings in me’: so begins Cleopatra’s final speech in Shakespeare’s tragedy Antony and Cleopatra. Her ‘immortal longings’ are her longings for immortality, her desire to leave behind the mortal world and enter the next. Curiously, it isn’t clear whether the historical Cleopatra died
August 2, 2021, 12:29pm When we talk about Raymond Carver, we talk about the short story. Despite having published eight poetry collections before his death (33 years ago to the day), he’s known for works like “Cathedral” and “Why Don’t You Dance.” But, as it turns out, Carver wrote short stories out of practicality, not
As yet another wave of infection blooms and the bitter assignment of vaccine passes becomes a reality, societies are being held hostage by a sadly familiar coalition of the uninformed, the misinformed, the misguided, and the misanthropic. They are making vaccine passports, which no one wants, a likely necessity. Without their noise and narcissism, vaccination
The tragic love story of Dido and Aeneas has been told numerous times, and Henry Purcell famously turned it into one of the first English operas in the late seventeenth century. Dido’s lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is a wonderful piece of music, powerful and moving: you can listen to it here. But unlike
TODAY: In 1924, William H. Gass is born in Fargo, North Dakota. Discovering a piece of the moon’s primordial crust, and other highlights from Apollo 15’s three days in a geologic wonderland. | Lit Hub History If “cities demonstrate their essential character when responding to a crisis,” what will New York City show when
July 30, 2021, 9:52am This Sunday marks Herman Melville’s 202nd birthday, and I decided to honor him by looking through a scholarly book of his correspondence to find something noteworthy to write about (beyond, of course, his passionate love letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne). Why, how do you celebrate birthdays? While much of the correspondence involved either
Like many of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories, the short 1933 story ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ uses its spare, direct dialogue to hint at the relationships between the characters and the themes the story is delicately and obliquely exploring. The story is about an old man who frequents a Spanish café at night, and the two
July 30, 2021, 12:26pm Today, dear readers, is Paperback Book Day! It’s the anniversary of the day that the first Penguin paperback was published in England. Good! Personally, I’ll take paperbacks over hardcovers any old day. Don’t @ me! They’re more affordable. They’re lighter. And they don’t wear book jackets that, while lovely, I personally
July 30, 2021, 12:50pm The Internet has opened up new modes of self-publishing for writers: subscription services like Substack and Patreon, online releases on platforms like Gumroad, and even NFTs. Now, we’re seeing the debut (to my knowledge) of a new self-publishing model: writer Aurora Mattia has published her latest story “Ezekiel in the Snow”
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the prophetic visions of a highly original writer Say ‘Myths of the Near Future’ to many people and they will think of the album by the Klaxons, but the Klaxons named their 2007 debut after a 1982 collection of short stories by J.
July 30, 2021, 1:23pm Sunjeev Sahota’s China Room, Grady Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group, S. A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears, Kristen Radtke’s Seek You, and The Letters of Shirley Jackson all feature among the best reviewed books of the month. Bought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.” Fiction 1. China
Like people, cities demonstrate their essential character when responding to a crisis. As a collection of islands and one-time swamps where the Hudson and East Rivers meet the Atlantic Ocean, New York was reminded of its basic geography in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy’s catastrophic surge brought an extra three meters (ten feet) of seawater into
Poets often find themselves backed into a corner when writing more traditional rhyming poetry. They find they’ve ended a line with the unpromising word ‘orange’ and now have to try to find a word that rhymes with it, or else change the offending word for something more rhyme-friendly. But ‘world’ is a curious example: a