Literature

TODAY: In 1933, John Gardner, best known for his 1971 novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth from the monster’s point of view, is born.    How to win friends and influence people: Start with Paul Hollywood’s Ultimate Focaccia. | Lit Hub Food Considering Ursula K. Le Guin’s “liberatory alternative” to car culture. | Lit

The American poet-librarian, Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), was a modernist whose work does strange and invigorating things with language. But unlike his fellow American modernists William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and e. e. cummings, MacLeish remains less well-known to the general reader: many people know Williams’s red wheelbarrow and Wallace Stevens’s blackbird, but the work of

‘Puss-in-Boots’, from her 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber, was the first story Angela Carter wrote which was designed to be ‘out-and-out funny’. The story is narrated by a cat name Figaro, who helps his master to become ‘friendly’ with a young woman his master has fallen in love with, in the hope that the man

July 19, 2022, 3:44pm Alice Dunbar Nelson was a poet, journalist, and activist. She also wrote plays, short stories, and edited a few anthologies. She was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and quite frankly, we don’t talk about her enough. In the 1920s and 1930s, she had her own columns at various local

The following is a story from Jem Calder’s Reward System, an ultra-contemporary and electrifyingly fresh collection of fictions about work, relationships, and the strange loop of technology and the self. Calder was born in Cambridge, and lives and works in London. His first two completed stories were published in The Stinging Fly and Granta. That

The English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was prolific over the course of his long life and career, although he wrote virtually no new poetry after he was appointed UK Poet Laureate in 1843. But between the early 1790s and the late 1800s, the most productive period of his career, Wordsworth wrote some of the

July 18, 2022, 10:13am Over the weekend—via a tweet from artist Amber Blade Jones, because the garbage bird website has its bright spots—I discovered Not/But, a comic strip that speaks directly to my self-defeating writer soul. Not/But is a series created by illustrator and comics artist Tonči Zonjić; it originally ran weekly between 2016 and

I was lined up in a mall outside a jungle gym, braving the closed-circuit plumes of COVID to tire out my kids on a glorified cat scratch tower, when I heard the child behind us ask, “Daddy, why do those kids have masks? Do I need one?” The child was talking about my kids. “Oh,

We always want what we can’t have. A Keen On guest last month told me that she wants artificial intelligence that can deliver more human empathy. But only we humans have empathy. Understanding and sharing the feelings of others is our superpower. And in tomorrow’s age of ubiquitous smart machines, it’s the one thing that

Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea, CJ Hauser’s The Crane Wife, and Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ The Man Who Could Move Clouds all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.” * Fiction 1. Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield(Flatiron

TODAY: In 1927, Theodor Geisel publishes his first cartoon as Dr. Seuss. “He was known as the improbably well-informed Yankee who had a preternatural ability to sniff out genius—and bring it to the United States.” On John Quinn, the man who introduced America to Pablo Picasso. | Lit Hub Art “Like life, writing forces a series of

Criticism of economic growth is almost as old as the phenomenon of economic growth itself. But the term “degrowth,” as it is used today, can be traced to relatively recent beginnings. Let us take a short look at its history. Some traditions of growth criticism date back to the late 18th century and ranged from

Robert Frost (1874-1963) is one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, whose work remains popular. Poems such as ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ and ‘The Road Not Taken’ are widely quoted, taught, studied, and loved. These poems have also given us some well-known quotations. But what are Robert Frost’s most

July 15, 2022, 11:15am A handwritten letter from J.R.R. Tolkien is currently up for auction, with bidding beginning at $5,000, if you’ve got that kind of cash lying around. The letter, which is dated April 12, 1956, is a response to a fan, and discusses both his inspiration for The Lord of the Rings universe

A single woman is drinking alone, crying over a man. She’s probably pining for her lost girlhood, the spotlight glow of youth and the gazes that gravitate to a girl bathing in it. These days, she’s sobbing in a bathtub, wallowing in her romantic regrets. Luckily, she still has her incisive eye and sarcastic tongue.

‘The Cop and the Anthem’ is a short story by the US short-story writer O. Henry, whose real name was William Sydney Porter (1862-1910). His stories are characterised by their irony, their occasional sentimentality, and by their surprise twist endings. ‘The Cop and the Anthem’ contains all three of these key elements of an O.

July 14, 2022, 10:30am Well, we still have some nice things—or rather, dogs do. While walking through my neighborhood in Missoula recently (a neighborhood that features seven Little Free Libraries for humans, it should be said), I stumbled across a very cute sight: some good Samaritan (by the looks of it, a small one) created a

I grew up thinking I didn’t matter, that no one cared what I had to say. The world didn’t see me, a daughter of working-class Mexican immigrants, and what it did see, it considered disposable, inconsequential. I rarely found portrayals of anyone like me—bookish and poor and surly and Brown—in the art that I enjoyed.