June 11, 2021, 11:56am Today at 1PM (EST) from Columbia University in New York City (or, you know, various people’s living rooms), the winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction will be announced. As well as a check for a cool $15,000 dollars, the victor (if there is to be one; see 2012) will
Literature
In his 1921 essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, T. S. Eliot made several of his most famous and important statements about poetry – including, by implication, his own poetry. It is in this essay that Eliot puts forward his well-known idea of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, among other theories. But what did Eliot mean by ‘dissociation
TODAY: In 1929, Anne Frank is born, and in 1942, she’s gifted a diary for her birthday. The chunk of chilled rubber seen ’round the world: how legendary physicist Richard Feynman helped figure out the Challenger disaster. | Lit Hub History Put the spark back in your love life writing practice: what Ron Hogan’s learned from
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the surprising origins of that ‘a lie is halfway round the world …’ quotation ‘A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.’ The line well-known, and has itself made its way round probably more than half
June 11, 2021, 1:27pm The winners and nominated finalists of the 105th Pulitzer Prizes were announced today via remote video stream. The winners each take home $15,000 dollars and serious bragging rights, not to mention an instant ticket into a very illustrious club. Due to the unusual nature of the year, the Pulitzer committee expanded the
The Last Supper is the meal that Jesus shares with his disciples after his triumphant entry into Jerusalem. At the Last Supper, Jesus announces that one of his disciples will betray him. The meal is the subject of one of the greatest works of Renaissance art, a mural painted on the wall of a nun’s
Thunderously groove-laden in one track and carefully layered as to channel the heavy metal gods in another, it’s obvious when listening to the new album So Far So Good from Greye that the noted Daytona Beach rock outfit has a lot of energy they’re looking to burn off this summer. Comprised of hard-hitting songs like “Lucky,” “Come
TODAY: In 1900, Leopoldo Marchal, one of the most important Argentine writers of the 20th century, is born. Emma Goldberg on the young doctors who went from medical school into a pandemic, graduating early to enlist in “the COVID army.” | Lit Hub Health Thomas J. Lax on the work of Carrie Mae Weems, who
There are a number of prominent themes of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Each of the key themes we have identified in the following article, though, throws out some surprising details and interpretations, so it’s worth probing some of the play’s most important themes and subjects in more detail. Revenge. Revenge is obviously an important theme in
June 10, 2021, 1:34pm Today marks the 93rd birthday of Maurice Sendak, titan of children’s literature, whose kindness and empathy for children shone through in his immersive, vivid body of work as well as in life. In a 1986 Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, later quoted in Applause, Sendak described his favorite compliment from
The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) never won the Nobel Prize for Literature, nor did he write a novel. But he is widely regarded as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century, was a considerable influence on magic realism, and penned some of the most original, clever, and thought-provoking short stories
TODAY: In 1928, Maurice Sendak is born. MAURICE SENDAK: Genius of American Picture Books, Exhibit and Sale is currently on view at the Society of Illustrators in New York through July 10. Image: © The Maurice Sendak Foundation “Water was always everywhere. And we accepted it. We exalted it. We prayed to it.” Ly Tran
The Book of Jonah is one of the shorter, not to mention more hermeneutically challenging, books of the Old Testament: how should we analyse and interpret this strange tale of a prophet being swallowed by a whale? Was it even a whale? Could the whole Book of Jonah, in fact, be satire? In the latest
June 9, 2021, 1:22pm Much has been made of Kate Winslet’s buzzy transformation into hard-boiled Philadelphia detective Mare for HBO Max’s Mare of Easttown, one of my favorite shows of the year. In The New York Times, Maureen Dowd catalogued every tool used to turn the glamorous Winslet into what Winslet herself described as a
The ‘balcony scene’ in Romeo and Juliet is fake news. ‘O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon’ is one of the most famous lines to appear in this scene, Act 2 Scene 2, but it’s questionable whether Romeo is actually looking up at Juliet on her balcony. We’ll return to this issue of
TODAY: In 1898, German-Italian writer, film-maker, and war correspondent Kurt Erich Suckert, who wrote under the pseudonym Curzio Malaparte, is born. The chunk of chilled rubber seen around the world: how legendary physicist Richard Feynman helped solve the Challenger disaster. | Lit Hub History “I realize now that my sleeplessness coincided with my decision
June 8, 2021, 2:56pm BREAKING NEWS: yesterday, Zooey Deschanel tweeted about Olivia Rodrigo’s hot new album, Sour. Real footage of Olivia Rodrigo crediting me for inspiring her number #1 album. (JK, but great album @Olivia_Rodrigo!) pic.twitter.com/hMDezbLjEL — zooey deschanel (@ZooeyDeschanel) June 7, 2021 She included a GIF from a brief moment in New Girl, lost
‘Banal Story’ is one of the shortest stories Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) ever wrote. Running to just two pages in most editions, the story first appeared in the Little Review magazine in 1926 before being collected in Hemingway’s Men Without Women the following year. Despite its brevity, ‘Banal Story’ has had critics scratching their heads over