Literature

‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’ is one of the greatest nonsense poems by the Victorian poet and artist Edward Lear (1812-88). Among other things, Lear is known for popularising the limerick among Victorian readers, and for being, along with Lewis Carroll, probably the chief exponent of nonsense verse in English. (We have gathered together

July 1, 2021, 2:02pm The Shirley Jackson Awards have announced their impressive list of nominees for the 2020 awards. The awards were established to celebrate the literary career of Shirley Jackson and recognize works that represent “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.” A jury of professional writers, editors,

Shakespeare’s Richard III was not the first Elizabethan play written about the latest Plantagenet king of England. An anonymous play, The True Tragedy of Richard III, was printed in 1594, though it’s thought to have been written and performed several years earlier. There was even a Latin play by Thomas Legge, Richardus Tertius, which was

TODAY: In 1915, short story writer and novelist Jean Stafford (here, in between Robert Lowell and Peter Taylor) is born.  In the latest installment of The Longest Year: 2020+, Isadora Kosofsky documents an LA Covid ward, and Suzanne Koven reflects on treating patients in another ward across the country. | Lit Hub Photography Humans have

‘In the Penal Colony’ is one of the best-known stories by Franz Kafka. After ‘The Metamorphosis’, it is his most acclaimed and widely discussed shorter work. Kafka wrote ‘In the Penal Colony’ in two weeks in 1914, while he was at work on his novel, The Trial. He revised it in 1918, as he was

June 30, 2021, 2:27pm To my fellow villagers— I’ve seen the tweets, comments, and high school English papers, and I want to respond. I am deeply sorry for my role in creating the Lottery, and in continuing to uphold systematic neighbor stoning. My youth, as well as my genuine belief in the sentiment “Lottery in

‘To every thing there is a season’, ‘nothing new under the sun’, ‘vanity of vanities’, ‘evil under the sun’, ‘the sun also rises’: perhaps there is no Old Testament book more chock-full of memorable phrases than the Book of Ecclesiastes. In essence, the author of Ecclesiastes tells us that everything we do is ‘vanity’: empty,

TODAY: In 1984, American playwright Lillian Hellman dies at 79.   Lavinia Liang considers the “Eastern Western,” a growing body of literature that’s reclaiming a xenophobic genre. | Lit Hub Criticism “There are certain novels that have the remarkable quality of being both timely and prophetic.” Margot Livesy on Kathrine Kressmann Taylor’s Address Unknown, which exposed

‘Envy’ is a poem by Mary Lamb, who is best-remembered for her Tales from Shakespeare which she co-authored with her brother, Charles. But she was also a fine poet, who, in ‘Envy’, presents to us an important truth about the nature of envy and the futility of believing the grass always greener on the other

The War of the Worlds is one of H. G. Wells’s early scientific romances: books which helped to lay the groundwork for modern science fiction. One adaptation was supposedly mistaken for a real news broadcast reporting an actual invasion, although we will come to that later on. The War of the Worlds is probably Wells’s most

June 29, 2021, 7:50am Why, you might be asking yourself, do all these introductions begin with some reference to the season or to how hot it is? It’s because that’s all I can think about. The feels-like temperature in Brooklyn is 100 degrees, and even my dog does not want to go outside. Thankfully, there

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ These are among the most famous lines in the New Testament: they begin the Gospel of St. John. But what does ‘In the beginning was the Word’ mean? Let’s take a closer look at the meaning of this

June 28, 2021, 1:43pm Maud Newton, original literary blogger and a valued presence on literary Twitter, will publish a memoir next year that grew out of her Harper’s cover essay, “American’s Ancestry Craze.” Lit Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for that book, Ancestor Trouble. Here’s a description of the book from Random House:

‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne’: so begins perhaps the most famous speech from William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. The words are uttered by Domitius Enobarbus, a follower of Mark Antony, in Act 2 Scene 2, as he describes the appearance of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, when Mark Antony first saw her

“We are a tale we tell ourselves.”–Heidi James, So the Doves* It wasn’t just that they were the only two people I’d heard use the phrase “gussied up.” It wasn’t that they both wrote books that kept you turning the pages right to the end and then wish you hadn’t got there. It wasn’t their

The Tower of Babel is one of the best-known structures mentioned in the Bible. But what was the tower’s purpose, and where was Babel? How much do we really know about this story? In many ways, the Tower of Babel is a kind of ‘just so’ story about how the world came to have many

George Orwell (1903-50) is one of the twentieth century’s most quotable writers. Although many of his most repeated statements come from his essays or from his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, a few of his most famous quotations are found in his 1945 novella, Animal Farm. But the meaning of these quotations is often misunderstood, so

‘Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die’: these lines have become famous, although they’re often misquoted. The quotation originated in the 1854 poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ written by the UK Poet Laureate of the time, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92). Tennyson, who was Poet Laureate for a record