‘Expostulation and Reply’ is the ideal poem for a schoolchild to throw back at their teacher, when that teacher accuses them of being idle or not ‘doing anything’ simply because they’re not reading books at that moment. In this poem, Wordsworth stages a conversation between his boyhood self and his schoolmaster, who believes that books
Literature
March 1, 2021, 1:57pm The Associated Press has reported that Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, the Dutch poet appointed by the Dutch publisher Meulenhoff to translate Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb” and her first poetry collection into Dutch, has stepped down after criticism that a white author was selected for the task. Rijneveld, who in 2020
February 26, 2021, 1:34pm It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… more superhero adaptation news! But this time, with some welcome literary cred: Deadline has just announced that Ta-Nehisi Coates will be writing the screenplay for the latest Superman reboot. J.J. Abrams is producing, and Henry Cavill will reprise his role as the Gap sale section of superheroes.
‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946) is one of the best-known essays by George Orwell (1903-50). As its title suggests, Orwell identifies a link between the (degraded) English language of his time and the degraded political situation: Orwell sees modern discourse (especially political discourse) as being less a matter of words chosen for their clear
The bullhorn starts up just after 11 am. “America first,” a man keeps shouting. “Trump won! Trump won!” From my room at the Orlando Hyatt, 19 floors up from the street below, his warbles through the window with unexpected immediacy, as if from just a few feet away. It’s only when I head out on
TODAY: In 1902, John Steinbeck is born in Salinas, California. Introducing The Longest Year: 2020+, photo essays from the year that won’t end. Up first, Elissa Schappell reflects on Rachel Cobb’s NYC dreamscape of protests and PPE. | Lit Hub “The protagonist could be our lost brother or uncle. Disaster is familiar, even eloquent.” Joy Harjo on the
‘The Minister’s Black Veil’ is one of the best-known and most widely studied short stories written by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. Subtitled ‘A Parable’, the story originally appeared in a gift book titled The Token and Atlantic Souvenir in 1836, before being collected in Hawthorne’s short-story collection Twice-Told Tales, the following year. ‘The Minister’s
It’s Friday morning, the kickoff to the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference, and one thing is clear from the start: the Orlando resort hosting this year’s event is teeming. Conference-goers crowd the Hyatt Regency’s air-conditioned hallways. In the lobby, recent arrivals wait impatiently with their bags. The line I’m moving through is progressing swiftly into
February 26, 2021, 1:41pm We’ve known for a while that HBO was working on turning Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 novel The Time Traveler’s Wife into a series. The show, which boasts Doctor Who and Sherlock writer Steven Moffat as a writer and executive producer, is in pre-production, but today, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Rose Leslie (Game of
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning of T. S. Eliot’s ‘this is the way the world ends’ ‘This is the way the world ends’, T. S. Eliot tells us at the end of his 1925 poem, ‘The Hollow Men’: ‘not with a bang but a whimper.’ The
February 26, 2021, 3:13pm There’s something thrilling about watching a movie or a TV show and finding that you recognize the characters’ surroundings— that you have stood on that street corner or peered into that shop before the characters, before that story begins. As someone who has been basically nowhere, I find it validating, like
February 25, 2021, 4:03pm Good news for all you Jenkophiles and Whiteheadheads out there: after four maddening months of mystery—which saw the release of two gorgeous teaser trailers but no premiere date—we now know when we’ll be able to watch Barry Jenkins’ small-screen adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historical epic, The Underground Railroad. The ten-episode
Charles Dickens (1812-70) is best-known for his fifteen novels and for shorter books like A Christmas Carol. However, Dickens’s was a restless talent, and during his publishing career that spanned more than thirty-five years, he also wrote countless articles, essays, and short stories. Although Dickens’s short stories are less famous than novels like Oliver Twist
February 25, 2021, 1:21pm On the 38th anniversary of Tennessee Williams’s death, we’re remembering his very first published piece of writing, written way before he was a literary giant—and even before he used his own name. (Well, his assumed name, but still.) As a sixteen-year-old, Williams was published in the 1927 issue of the “magazine
February 24, 2021, 1:21pm The movie adaptation of Nico Walker’s Cherry—the best-selling debut novel about an Iraq veteran turned heroin addict turned bank robber—will be released in theaters in two days, directed by the Russo Brothers (who you might know from Avengers) and starring Tom Holland (who you might know from Avengers). The auction for
‘The Hare and the Tortoise’ is one of Aesop’s best-known fables. The meaning or ‘moral’ of the fable is worth analysing more closely, however, and the story has attracted a number of competing – indeed, actively conflicting – interpretations. So let’s take a closer look at the meaning of ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’ (sometimes
February 24, 2021, 3:09pm Since you’re on here, you know that it is the month of the Internet novel. Two heavy-hitters in particular—Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts and Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking about This—have been brought into the world, and everyone on Book Twitter seems to be ruminating on what we want from this kind
February 23, 2021, 3:53pm Lawrence Ferlinghetti—a crucial supporter of the Beat movement and literary icon who bore a century’s worth of witness to social and political transformation—died on Monday at the age of 101 of interstitial lung disease, The Washington Post confirmed. Ferlinghetti epitomized the soul of San Francisco counterculture for generations of artists and