TODAY: In 1946, W. H. Auden becomes a US Citizen. Can national service keep America from another civil war? | Lit Hub Politics “It had already been simmering in the pot, but now one of the greatest combinations in music history was about to erupt.” When Biggie Smalls and Puff Daddy collaborated on Ready
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May 20, 2022, 9:44am Phew. Thanks to the intrepid work of books valuer Jim Spencer (at an antiques show in the surely-it-must-be-charming Moreton-in-Marsh), we’ll finally have a chance to sit back at the beach and read Christiaan Huygens’ The Celestial World Discover’d: Or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants and Productions of the Worlds in the
‘The World of Apples’ is a short story by the American writer John Cheever (1912-82). It appeared as the title story in his 1973 collection of the same name. The story concerns an elderly poet who, while living in Italy, develops and overwhelming urge to write bawdy limericks instead of the more dignified and refined
TODAY: In 1910, French author Colette begins to publish her novel The Vagabond in serial form. “To live with other people is to be responsible for protecting them from your moods. Or perhaps, to protect the delicate gift of your moods from them.” Seema Reza on the joy of being (completely) alone. | Lit Hub
It’s springtime again in New York City, which makes me think of You’ve Got Mail. “You don’t want to miss New York in the spring,” Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) advises Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) late in the movie, and you don’t, it’s true. Making good on its advice, the film’s third act captures the Upper
‘The Company of Wolves’ is the second of a trio of wolf stories in Angela Carter’s 1979 short-story collection The Bloody Chamber. It is also arguably the most controversial. The story is divided into two sections: a prefatory passage which discusses lycanthropy or werewolves, and the main story which is a version of the Little
May 20, 2022, 10:23am In very 1984 news, Belarus has banned the sale of 1984. Belarusian weekly newspaper, Nasha Niva, reported that security forces detained Andrei Yanushkevich, publisher and bookstore owner, and confiscated 200 books, with a focus on 1984. Nasha Niva also reported that they had obtained a copy of the government order to halt sales of
The following is excerpted from Nina Shope’s Asylum. Shope is the author of Hangings: Three Novellas, published by Starcherone Books. Asylum is her first full-length novel. Her fiction has appeared in Quarter After Eight, Fourteen Hills, 3rd Bed, Open City, Sleeping Fish, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Brown University and an
‘Ode to My Socks’ is a 1956 poem by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-73). Neruda, who was born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (Pablo Neruda was his pen name, though he later changed it officially), won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971 and is widely regarded as one of the major poets of
This week on The Maris Review, Annie Hartnett joins Maris Kreizman to discuss her latest novel, Unlikely Animals, out now from Ballantine Books. Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts. *On using ghosts as narrators: Annie Hartnett: Ernest Harold Baines showed up [in ] as a ghost, and I didn’t have to
To speak of Italo Calvino’s popularity outside of Italy is to speak of Calvino in translation, given that he has been read and loved abroad in other languages and not in Italian. For an author who floats, as Calvino himself said, “a bit in mid-air,” translation—that twofold and intermediate space—was his destiny. Let’s start with
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a prolific novelist, short-story writer, and poet, who is perhaps best-known for classic children’s books like The Jungle Book and for poems like ‘If—’. But Kipling’s short stories for adults often get overlooked – a fact which is perhaps hardly surprising given how much enduring and endurable writing Kipling produced. Below,
May 18, 2022, 12:47pm You probably don’t need to be reminded that book-banning is alive and well in America. But take heart: there are some incredible people doing what they can to combat it. Skylark Bookshop in Columbia, Missouri, has launched a banned books subscription service, cleverly called Getting the Banned Back Together. In their
By 1910, Greenwich Village was the acknowledged center of those who claimed to be bohemians and whose lifestyle caused others to label them as such. America’s bohemian movement had deep artistic and political roots in 19th-century England and France. The English suffragist movement and the international progressive, socialist, Marxist, and French syndicalist labor movements had
‘Happy Endings’ is a short story (or, perhaps more accurately, a piece of metafiction) which was first published in Margaret Atwood’s 1983 collection, Murder in the Dark. The story offers six alternative storylines which feature a relationship between a man and a woman. Because of its postmodern and metafictional elements, ‘Happy Endings’ requires a few
May 17, 2022, 12:34pm Here’s a cool one. The first trailer for Spiderhead, the hotly-anticipated (around the Lit Hub water cooler, at least) Netflix film based on George Saunders’ short story “Escape From Spiderhead,” has been released and it looks like a hoot (a dark and disquieting hoot, but a hoot nonetheless). [embedded content] Set
May 16, 2022, 10:59am I am, indeed, biased, but more book coverage by a prominent national magazine is a good thing for America. Sure, there are plenty of bad books (evil ones, even!), but as a medium, books continue to be the best way for any given society to understand and interrogate itself. So I
‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ is a short story by the British-born science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008). It was first published in the 1953 anthology Star Science Fiction Stories #1, before being collected in Clarke’s The Other Side of the Sky. A short tale about religion, computers, and the end of the