Suffering is a topic that features heavily in poetry: laments, elegies, love poems (especially poems about unrequited love), and some of the more introspective Romantic poems often touch upon human suffering and emotionally tough times and experiences. Below, we select and introduce ten of the very best poems about suffering, from the Middle Ages to
Literature
August 10, 2022, 10:03am In 2012, Sherlock Holmes was officially inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records as the human literary character most frequently portrayed on film and television: a whopping 254 times, beating out the next most popular character, Hamlet, by 48 portrayals. (Of course, the character has racked up even more depictions
August 9, 2022, 2:09pm The Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha has been denied entry to Israel to interview for the U.S. visa he needs to return to his graduate program at Syracuse University. As reported by Inside Higher Ed earlier today: Abu Toha, who said he completed one year of his program at Syracuse already before returning
‘The Ebony Horse’ is one of the most exciting and enchanting story from the Arabian Nights, also known as the One Thousand and One Nights. Indeed, the tale is interesting because it even borders on being ‘science fiction’ before the genre existed. It sees a cunning inventor design an ebony horse which is capable of
August 9, 2022, 9:29am What is the absolute maximum number of books one can fit into a single Joan Didion tote? Asking for a friend! * Belinda Huijuan Tang, A Map for the Missing(Penguin Press) “…spectacular … A breathtaking portrait of the regret that can forever shape a life when someone helplessly sticks to the
August 8, 2022, 2:59pm The Book Industry Charitable Foundation (BINC)—which helps bookstore owners and employees with unforeseen emergency financial needs—is this week urging people to donate money to help a number of flood-ravaged bookstores in St. Louis and eastern Kentucky. Recent torrential rains in the region have had a devastating impact on independent bookstores like
Fiction often deals with domestic matters, including family, and some of the finest short stories treat the important, though sometimes fraught, relationship between parents and their children. What makes a good parent? What if two parents disagree over what’s best for their children, or for the family as a whole? The following short stories are
August 8, 2022, 11:30am Wow. According to this excerpt posted at The New Yorker this morning, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Donald Trump, was genuinely worried that the then-president was using Hitler as a role model for acquiring and consolidating power. The following is from Susan B. Glasser and
In 2008, after 13 years together, my literary agent and I parted ways. (To preserve her anonymity, let’s call her Michael Ovitz.) Between 1995 and 2002, Michael Ovitz sold two of my novels, including my debut, Hunger Point. By any measure, our partnership was a terrific success. Michael Ovitz and I were more than just
The following first appeared in Lit Hub’s The Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. You could go mad trying to write about a city. Taking the city as your subject, that is, and building a fiction around and within it. I’ve just tried it myself and I can tell you that it’s a fairly bewildering experience. My subject,
In Bodies Bodies Bodies, the new film from director Halina Reijn and writers Sarah DeLappe and Kristen Roupenian (of “Cat Person” fame), a group of mean, rich, and very high twentysomethings weather a storm in a huge mansion, believing one among them to be a killer after the lights go out and a party game
TODAY: In 1917, Barbara Cooney, illustrator of over 100 children’s books and National Book Award winner (Miss Rumphius), is born. Ella Risbridger muses on the pain-writing-money trifecta, Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, and memoir as fiction. | Lit Hub Criticism Lulu Miller in praise of “the uncrushable beetle.” | Lit Hub Nature How Kiki de Montparnasse, a muse with a
The following is from Alejandro Zambra’s first novel Bonsai. Zambra is the award-winning author of the novels Chilean Poet, Ways of Going Home, The Private Lives of Trees, as well as two other works of fiction: Multiple Choice and My Documents. His short stories have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times
What are some of the best short stories about childhood, and the experiences of children? Although there are dozens of classic tales about those formative years, the following stories represent, for our money, some of the finest stories about children taking the rocky path of knowledge and experience towards adulthood. Not all of them are
TODAY: In 1934, American novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer Wendell Berry is born. Adam Scovell travels back to the Wirral Peninsula, “determined to find some of the old ghosts that haunted Malcolm Lowry.” | Lit Hub Criticism On Shahrzad Mozafar and other Muslim women who fought for a forbidden love: the
August 4, 2022, 1:36pm Rumors have been confirmed that the internet’s favorite celebrity, Keanu Reeves, will star in an 8-part adaptation of Erik Larson’s 2003 bestseller, The Devil in the White City, which tells the story of Daniel H. Burnham, a demanding but visionary architect who races to make his mark on history with the
‘The Widow and the Parrot’ is not one of Virginia Woolf’s best-known works. But then how many people familiar with The Waves or Mrs Dalloway are even aware that Woolf wrote a short story for children? Woolf wrote ‘The Widow and the Parrot’ in the early 1920s for the family newspaper edited by her nephews
August 4, 2022, 9:07am It’s a tale as old as time: a Brazilian writer sets her Kindle aside for a few weeks to work on her own novel, and when she goes back to get a little reading done, finds that the device has been infested with a horde of tiny white ants. “My virtual