TODAY: In 1927, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is published. Annette Gordon-Reed on Juneteenth, an oral history of ACT UP, and a new Bob Dylan biography all feature among May’s new and noteworthy nonfiction. | Lit Hub Reading Lists David Coggins wants you to experience the poetry of fly-fishing. | Lit Hub Sports “My main problem
Literature
Great Expectations is one of Dickens’s most popular novels: perhaps only Oliver Twist and David Copperfield are equally well-known and well-regarded among his full-length novels (A Christmas Carol, technically a novella, is surely his most famous book of all). Not bad for a novel which Dickens only started writing because another novel, by his now-forgotten
May 4, 2021, 3:51pm St. Vincent, aka Annie Clark, is gearing up for a new album release in ten days, which—in classic St. Vincent form—means a completely reinvented sonic and visual palette via teasers and singles. Clark’s new album, Daddy’s Home, wears its ‘70’s influences on its sleeve, but oldies rock isn’t all Clark’s been
TODAY: In 1916, journalist and urbanist Jane Jacobs is born. It’s a war, a war of punctuation marks; these famous writers are—perhaps unsurprisingly—willing to die on these comma-ridden hills! | Lit Hub Happy New Books Tuesday, from these 23 releases that are begging to be read by you. | The Hub “Gathering observations and making
‘And what’s he then that says I play the villain?’ is one of a number of major soliloquies spoken by Iago, the villain and chief architect of William Shakespeare’s Othello. We’ve previously analysed Othello here, but now let’s take a closer look at the speech which begins ‘And what’s he then that says I play
May 3, 2021, 1:31pm Kundiman has just announced this year’s cohort of fellows for the Kundiman Mentorship Lab, an annual program supporting nine NYC-based emerging Asian American artists per year. Mentorship Fellows will receive a $1000 stipend, craft classes and genre workshops, individual mentorships, and a culminating public reading in 2022. This year’s fellows will
TODAY: In 1937, Brazilian author Nélida Piñon is born. Against leaving your options open: Pete Davis makes a counterargument in an era of infinite browsing. | Lit Hub “The novel offers a meticulous dissection of a German male psyche at a time when German masculinity was being mobilized in a vast genocidal enterprise.” Clayton Wickham
Diamonds have long been regarded as the most precious of all of the precious gemstones. For this reason, diamonds often symbolise perfection, purity, and rarity; however, because of the durability of diamond – it is famously capable of cutting glass – diamonds also sometimes symbolise imperviousness and indestructibility. The word adamant, used of someone who
April 30, 2021, 10:00am Any writer will tell you that rejection is as much a part of the game as procrastination, self-loathing, or em dashes. Of course, if you’re anything like me, you might secretly suspect that the lauded writers who insist on Twitter that they deal with rejection constantly are just pandering to us
April 30, 2021, 12:08pm As the India’s horrific COVID surge intensifies, a group of authors from around the world (led by the narrative nonfiction writer Sonia Faleiro) have come together to support the essential work of Mission Oxygen India, an organization dedicated to helping hospitals across the country get immediate access to direly-needed oxygen concentrators.
Memorably filmed by Tim Burton in a 1999 adaptation that changed a number of details of Irving’s original story, ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ is, along with ‘Rip Van Winkle’ (which we have analysed here), Irving’s best-known work. First published in 1820, the story is variously regarded as a Gothic tale and a modern folk
April 30, 2021, 12:16pm The emoticon was invented on September 19, 1982, by Dr. Scott Fahlman, a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. He and his colleagues were looking for a solution to misunderstandings of tone on an “electronic bulletin board.” Specifically, they needed a symbol to indicate that something was
TODAY: In 1908, Giovanni Guareschi, Italian journalist, humorist, and cartoonist, is born. If you’ve ever wanted to attend a rave deep in Chernobyl’s exclusion zone, now’s your chance. | Lit Hub Photography “The atmosphere was mostly awkward silences, slight terror at having their poems chosen for discussion, and equal terror at having them ignored.” When
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of a famous quotation from T. S. Eliot ‘Talent borrows; genius steals.’ This four-word slogan has often been attributed to Oscar Wilde, although it wasn’t one of Wilde’s quips. But then Wilde is, like Mark Twain and Winston Churchill, one of
April 30, 2021, 1:21pm Annie Dillard, one of our best writers, is also one of our best teachers. We know because her students—and her readers—keep telling us. In Alexander Chee’s How to Write An Autobiographical Novel, Dillard appears as a generous, galvanizing teacher urging her students to envision their books on the shelves of bookstores.
TODAY: In 1888, John Crowe Ransom, poet, critic, and founder of the Kenyon Review, is born. “To see his name behind one you hadn’t heard of was to be vouched for in the most essential way.” Lauren Cerand remembers Giancarlo DiTrapano. | Lit Hub Leidy Klotz probes the cultural origins of our need to add,
‘Politics vs Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels’ is a 1946 essay by George Orwell (1903-50). In the essay, Orwell explores Swift’s depiction and view of humanity in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a novel we have analysed here. You can read ‘Politics vs Literature’ in full here, but below we offer a short summary, and analysis,
April 29, 2021, 12:28pm Literature can speak to us. In this case, literally: Danish electronics company Bang & Olufsen has designed a new wireless speaker that resembles a book. The sleek ten-inch tall speaker fits neatly into a bookshelf and is nine hundred dollars. Finally, libraries can be noisy! It may seem like a novelty