Apples are a common fruit, and so it’s little surprise that apples have come to have powerful and distinctive symbolic properties in works of literature, religion, and myth over the centuries. But there are a number of misconceptions and wrong assumptions about apple-symbolism. How can we tell the bad apples from the rest? In this
Literature
April 16, 2021, 11:48am Beware—there’s a new wave of COVID! It’s novels. The latest writer to be infected is Super Sad True Love Story author Gary Shteyngart, whose newly announced novel Our Country Friends follows the shifting relationships of a group of friends at a country house in upstate New York as they hide from
April 16, 2021, 12:55pm Tomorrow marks the 124th birthday of Thornton Wilder—and we’re celebrating by watching the opening monologue of the formally innovative Our Town delivered by another theatrical innovator, Spalding Gray. Spalding Gray as the Narrator in Our Town seems like perfect casting: Gray was known for his solo monologues, like Swimming to Cambodia,
‘The Lost Decade’ is one of the shortest works by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), the American author best-known for The Great Gatsby. Published in Esquire magazine in December 1939, just one year before Fitzgerald died, ‘The Lost Decade’ is one of his most powerful short stories to deal with the effects of drink and the
TODAY: In 1897, Thornton Wilder, the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and drama, is born. JoAnne Tompkins considers the inner life of an aging shelter dog. | Lit Hub “Although it isn’t infectious like a virus, depression thrives on proximity, traveling down familial attachments, especially from mother to child.” Alex Riley on
April 16, 2021, 12:16pm When I was a kid, there was nothing I loved more than a fresh new sketchbook (so much so that I tended to abandon them after filling out four or five drawings of people standing on tippie toes because I never did figure out how to draw feet standing normally). But
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Kristin Swenson’s fascinating and accessible introduction to the Bible In the earliest New Testament writings, the mother of Jesus doesn’t even have a name. Paul says simply that Jesus was born from a woman, and there are very few references to the Virgin
April 16, 2021, 1:28pm Sleuths rejoice! After twenty years, the Oxfordshire house where Dame Agatha Christie wrote many of her most famous crime novels is on the market once more with a guide price of over £2.75 million. It’s got to be said that this is a great day for sleuths. Christie moved into Winterbrook
The Great Gatsby is the quintessential Jazz Age novel, capturing a mood and a moment in American history in the 1920s, after the end of the First World War. Rather surprisingly, The Great Gatsby sold no more than 25,000 copies in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lifetime. It has now sold over 25 million copies. If Fitzgerald had
April 14, 2021, 7:30pm This evening, in a virtual ceremony, the Whiting Foundation announced the recipients of its 2021 Whiting Awards, which seek to “recognize excellence and promise in a spectrum of emerging talent.” These ten writers, working in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, will each be awarded $50,000, prize money that the Whiting Foundation
‘The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing’ is a well-known phrase and a well-known fable. Most people would attribute the fable to Aesop, the master fabulist of classical times. However, was we will discuss later on in our analysis of this story, this is inaccurate. Before we analyse the meaning and history of the ‘Wolf in Sheep’s
April 14, 2021, 3:09pm In a one-sentence aside in The New York Times, Ben Smith revealed that Bustle Media Group is rebooting controversial news and gossip site Gawker, three years after BMG bought Gawker for only $1.35 million at a bankruptcy auction. Bustle Media Group confirmed a new Gawker launch is in the works to
April 13, 2021, 2:38pm Fanny in Mansfield Park was right when she said that “to sit in the shade in a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment”—and Austen fans will soon be able to refresh themselves right where Jane Austen did. According to the owners, soon vacationers will be able
Previously, we have offered a short introduction to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, one of his most popular tragedies. But there is plenty to explore in this, one of Shakespeare’s longest plays, so in this post we’re going to focus on the interesting side of the key characters in Hamlet, offering a mini-analysis of the role of these
April 13, 2021, 3:07pm Ferrante fanatics of the world, rejoice (or, you know, despair if you like. I don’t know your taste in actors): Natalie Portman—the Academy Award-winning star of Black Swan, Jackie, and, eh, Thor: The Dark World—is set to executive produce and play the lead in an upcoming HBO Films adaptation of the mysterious Italian
April 12, 2021, 12:23pm A brief, unsurprising, and characteristically unpleasant update on the Andrew Cuomo book deal debacle: several current and former Cuomo staffers have anonymously told the Times Union that, counter to Cuomo’s claims, staffers were given tasks related to Cuomo’s memoir about the COVID-19 pandemic, American Crisis, as part of their governmental duties—violating
In January 2021, the 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman achieved a record: she became the youngest person ever to recite a poem at a US President’s inauguration, when Gorman read her poem ‘The Hill We Climb’ at the inauguration of President Joe Biden. The poem is hopeful while being realistic about the struggles the United States
April 12, 2021, 1:44pm Today marks the 74th birthday of the late Kathy Acker: titan of literary punk, defying genre and format, collaging autobiography and reference texts. There’s no shortage of great writing examining facets of Acker’s work—in Lit Hub alone, you can learn about her from the likes of Neil Gaiman, Douglas A. Martin,