‘The Isle is Full of Noises’: Caliban’s speech from The Tempest has become one of the most celebrated and studied sections of Shakespeare’s play. The Tempest is, of all Shakespeare’s plays, perhaps the one filled with the most magic and enchantment; only A Midsummer Night’s Dream potentially matches it. Before we offer a summary and
Literature
George Saunders is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award; The Braindead Megaphone; and the critically acclaimed short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. He teaches in the creative writing program at
January 11, 2021, 4:07pm ATTENTION ARTISTS: The Brooklyn Public Library is looking for a new library card design. They are specifically looking for a work of art that celebrates Black American culture and history! What started as a proposal from Wendy A. Robinson of the Community Board 3’s Parks, Arts & Culture Committee is now
Translated by Martin Aitken On January 9, 1978, I was nine years old and living on a new housing estate in Tromøya outside Arendal in Norway. I’ve no idea what happened in my life on that particular day, nothing has stuck in my memory. But the records of the meteorological station at nearby Torungen Lighthouse
January 8, 2021, 10:30am This week, we should have had more time to celebrate Jon Ossoff. In the hours before Wednesday turned into a terrible day for democracy, one very good thing happened: Ossoff defeated Republican David Purdue in the Georgia special election runoff, adding his victory to Raphael Warnock’s to give Democrats control of
TODAY: In 1908, Simone de Beauvoir is born in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, France. The coup attempt was not a surprise—some readings on how we got here: Rebecca Solnit on the natural culmination of white supremacist identity politics • Timothy Denevi, in the crowd with QAnon as Trump calls for a coup • David Zucchino on the Wilmington insurrection of 1898,
One way to understand the enormity of what happened in the nation’s capitol Wednesday is to remember another terrible and historic day in 21st-century American history. The differences are immense and instructive: 9/11 was an outside job, and though the loss of life and material destruction was immense, we as a nation had a lot
January 8, 2021, 12:26pm Here’s some surprising end-of-2020 good news: books are doing . . . well? According to NPD BookScan, unit sales of print books in the United States rose 8.2% in 2020. Units hit 750.9 million this year—57.2 million up from last year. This is fairly surprising, given the pandemic was expected to
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses ‘Songs to Joannes’, a little-known work of avant-garde modernist poetry Modernist poetry, at least as it’s usually taught on university survey courses and as it’s fixed in the popular imagination, is something of a closed shop: not just because of its perceived elitism
January 8, 2021, 1:00pm As I was scrolling through Lit Hub’s massive 2021 preview, I noticed something: Rainbows. Specifically, several books featuring full-cover, highly saturated, blurrily blended rainbows. I can only assume, considering that rainbows are generally considered to be a) pretty b) gay and c) paths to treasure, that this is a sign from
When mathematicians talk about the fourth dimension, we’re not talking about time. We’re talking about a fourth geometric dimension, just like the first three. There’s up-down, left-right, forward-back, and then, let’s say, “flim-flam.” You know, another one. It’s pretty clear from looking around, though, that our world has only three spatial dimensions. Don’t take my
Yesterday’s white riot launched by the president’s incendiary rally was another reminder that there are, in the minds of too many people with too much power, those who are considered to be innocent and deserving of respect even when in the act of committing violent crimes. The corollary is that there are others assumed to
January 6, 2021, 2:03pm It’s 2021, but (surprise!) essentially nothing has changed: COVID is still ravaging the United States and no meaningful government aid has arrived. Oh, one thing has changed: a new, more contagious variant of COVID has spread to the U.S. Happy New Year! During times of crisis, carving out time to write
One of the great tragic love stories from Greek mythology, the tale of the musician Orpheus and his wife Eurydice features love, death, poetry, and the afterlife. But as with the tale of Echo and Narcissus, this is a doomed love story made more famous through Roman writers (Ovid, Virgil) than Greek originals. Before we
January 6, 2021, 2:07pm 2021 is already starting off right (movie-wise, at least): Deadline has just announced that Tiffany Haddish is in final negotiations to star in the screen adaptation of National Book Award winner M.T. Anderson’s sci-fi novel Landscape with Invisible Hand, which will be produced by MGM, Annapurna and Brad Pitt’s Plan B Productions.
January 5, 2021, 9:59am A mere four (4) days after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel contender hit the public domain, we have our very first (published) take: a prequel, by Michael Farris Smith, author of Blackwood. We first heard about Nick back in the hazy pandemic summer of 2020, and while I’m always skeptical about these