The following is excerpted from Megan Nolan’s debut novel Acts of Desperation, about the tensions between rebellion and submission, escaping degradation and eroticizing it, loving and being lovable. Nolan’s essays, fiction and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the White Review, and the Sunday Times, among others. Regular columns of her cultural commentary
Literature
Along with his contemporary, the great painter and poet Edward Lear (1812-88), Lewis Carroll, who was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-98), is one of the greatest Victorian purveyors of nonsense literature. Unlike Lear, Carroll poured his nonsense into fiction as well as some of the most famous and best-loved poems in the English language, so
March 4, 2021, 2:42pm Yes, you read that headline correctly. The first trailer for Made for Love—the upcoming HBO adaptation of Alyssa Nutting’s batshit 2017 novel—has hit the internet, and it is weird in all the most wondrous ways. Chief among them: the dulcet tones of Ray Romano, who soundtracks the action with a spoken-word
Late in 1942 a Buddhist monk living in Los Angeles carefully inscribed his name in a recently published book by the poet Wallace Stevens. The Buddhist monk had moved to Los Angeles from Japan a year earlier. The book was Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction, published by the Cummington Press, a small press in Massachusetts
Of Oscar Wilde’s various short works for children, ‘The Happy Prince’ (1888) occupies a special place as his signature tale, and is perhaps Wilde’s definitive statement about the relationship between inner and outer beauty. ‘The Happy Prince’ is a sad tale that clearly owes much to earlier fairy stories, especially the tales of Hans Christian
March 3, 2021, 4:01pm While we don’t know what the state of the our pandemic society will be come September, we can at least be sure that we’ll all be getting a little Joy Williams, as a treat. Specifically, a new novel—her fifth, and her first since 2000’s The Quick and the Dead, which was
Hosted by Paul Holdengräber, The Quarantine Tapes chronicles shifting paradigms in the age of social distancing. Each day, Paul calls a guest for a brief discussion about how they are experiencing the global pandemic. * Paul Holdengräber is joined by Johnny Temple on Episode 167 of The Quarantine Tapes. A musician and publisher, Johnny tells
Ghosts, perhaps Henrik Ibsen’s most unremittingly bleak play, caused a scandal when it was first performed in 1882. It was memorably denounced as an ‘open sewer’ by one critic, for its frank exploration of sexual promiscuity and venereal disease. Ghosts: summary Ghosts has a very small cast of characters: just five, in fact. There’s Mrs
March 2, 2021, 1:31pm 91 years ago today marks the death of D.H. Lawrence, who E.M. Forster called “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation” and whose writing Joseph Conrad called “Filth . . . nothing but obscenities.” Both can be true; today we’re remembering a work by Lawrence that is both filthy and greatly
March 1, 2021, 1:23pm Akwaeke Emezi (Freshwater, Pet, The Death of Vivek Oji) is making their romance debut with You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty. The novel, which will be published in 2022 by Atria, centers on “a young artist struggling to overcome the loss of an old love, while inviting a new
‘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
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