Literature

‘Soft you, a word or two before you go’: so begins Othello’s last major speech before he stabs himself. His last words, famously, are ‘I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee’. But between these two lines are a number of other noteworthy moments which call out for closer textual analysis. Let’s go through Othello’s speech,

July 26, 2021, 1:39pm Haruki Murakami’s writing has inspired many creatives’ own practices, from visual artists to video game designers to filmmakers to other writers. And hopefully we’ll be seeing yet another artist-turned-Murakami-enthusiast: Joe Jonas has revealed he’s been reading Murakami as he works on new music. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal,

July 23, 2021, 10:25am In March 2022, Erika Robuck, bestselling historical fiction author, will publish Sisters of Night and Fog, a novel based on the true story of an American socialite and a British secret. The publisher, Berkley, describes it like this: Set across the European theater of WWII, Sisters of Night and Fog tells the

The story of Arachne is one of the most famous of the Greek myths dealing with young women. Or at least, it is perhaps the most famous one not to involve the young woman either being carried off by Zeus (who had something of a reputation for doing that) or falling in love with someone

July 23, 2021, 11:45am “I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.” Today marks the 133rd anniversary of the birth of Raymond Chandler, patron saint of Los Angeles noir and perhaps the most famous crime fiction writer of all time. Each of his nine novels, from The Big Sleep (1939) to the posthumously

‘The Judgment’, written in 1912, was in many ways Franz Kafka’s breakthrough work. In this short story, a man writes to his friend who is living in Russia. He then speaks to his father, who questions whether the friend even exists. At the end of the story, the man’s father condemns his son to death

July 23, 2021, 11:51am Yesterday, the Belarusian Justice Ministry moved to shut down PEN Belarus, sister organization of PEN America currently run by Nobel winner Svetlana Alexievich. This news comes amid widespread crackdowns on civil society activists and independent media by the Belarusian government this week, which president Alexander Lukashenko described as a “mopping-up operation”

TODAY: In 1900, Zelda Fitzgerald, neé Sayre, is born.    An unknown genius with a trunk full of poems: Richard Zenith on the mysteries and identities of Fernando Pessoa. | Lit Hub Biography “I arrive now at the end of this journey with a finished film that I’ll happily admit cannot do justice to the well from

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle ponders the links between famous writers and advertising slogans Fay Weldon, author of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), is one of several famous novelists who started out in the field of advertising. In this connection she is probably most famous for

July 23, 2021, 12:35pm Good news for fans of Elvis, or Kahlil Gibran, or annotation: Elvis Presley’s annotated copy of Kahlil Gibran’s prose poem collection The Prophet is on sale now from Peter Harrington for £19,500. Presley loved The Prophet, reading it so often that he memorized it; he gave annotated copies to several friends.

What is ‘manna’ from heaven? Manna is the name given to the food the Israelites ate during the wilderness wanderings recounted in Exodus chapter 16, following the parting of the Red Sea after the Israelites’ escape out of Egypt, where they had been kept as slaves of the Egyptians. But what precisely is manna? Let’s

July 23, 2021, 1:02pm Under its new “Read in Color” initiative, the Little Free Library is partnering with Brilliant Detroit—an organization which provides children educational programming and support in high-need Detroit neighborhoods—to bring thousands of diverse books to Detroit neighborhoods through Little Free Library boxes. Fourteen book-sharing boxes stocked with 2,500 books will be installed

Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry, also known as The Defence of Poesy, was written in 1579-80). It has at least one great claim to fame: it’s the first work of ‘literary criticism’ in English. Sidney’s essay is an ‘apology’ for, or defence of, the art of poetry, but Sidney was inspired to write

July 22, 2021, 3:03pm Ring the alarum-bell! It’s your first look at Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand as literature’s favorite murderous power couple, the Macbeths. (Unrelated: should someone should write a contemporary adaptation in which Lady Macbeth is a #GirlBoss and Macduff is a journalist at Business Insider?) Along with the photo came the announcement

‘The Pearl of Love’ is a 1925 short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946). In 1927, Wells told the Sunday Express that this story, and his ‘The Country of the Blind’, were his two favourites among his short stories. Although it’s not his best-known story, it’s one of his most intriguing because the ultimate meaning

July 22, 2021, 1:23pm Exciting news for Haruki Murakami fans, as always: this past week, director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s feature adaptation of Murakami’s short story “Drive My Car” won Best Screenplay at Cannes. The screenplay was written by Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe; this marks the first time a Japanese writer has won Best Screenplay in Cannes’s

In the Garden of Gethsemane, Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus to the Romans by identifying him in public so they could seize Jesus and arrest him. Judas pointed out Jesus to the authorities by kissing him in greeting. But there is more to this story than meets the eye, so let’s take a closer look at

July 21, 2021, 2:39pm Well, $206,886, to be more exact. That’s $2,652 per card, in case you’re wondering. The Tarot de Marseille deck, gifted to Plath by Ted Hughes on the occasion of her 24th birthday, sold earlier this afternoon at a much-ballyhooed online auction (somewhat creepily titled Your Own Sylvia) conducted by Sotheby’s London.