Literature

TODAY: In 1940, Angela Carter is born.    Also on Lit Hub: Yiyun Li on the solaces (and limits) of music • Hernan Diaz on learning from Borges • Why Roe v. Wade was just the beginning • Seven contemporary writers on the literature of abortion • Marcia DeSanctis tries to reconcile her love of Russian lit with Putin’s ascendancy

May 6, 2022, 2:15pm Once in a while, you come across a short story that just puts a spell on you. You reach the end of it, and you find yourself a little changed, and you want to turn back to the beginning and read it over—even more carefully—line by line to look for clues

‘The Shawl’ is the best-known and most widely studied short story by the American writer Cynthia Ozick (born 1928). Published in 1980, ‘The Shawl’ is about a Jewish mother and her infant daughter and niece, living in Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War. The story contains some very harrowing imagery and is noteworthy for

Discoveries can take many forms: an explorer discovering a new land, an astronomer discovering a whole new planet or galaxy, or a poet discovering the truth about love, nature, or even, for that matter, truth itself. The following ten poems are our pick of the best ‘discovery’ poems: poems which are about people discovering things,

‘The Jockey’ is a short story by the American writer Carson McCullers (1917-67). McCullers wrote ‘The Jockey’ in 1941, when she was just 24 years old. The story is about a jockey named Bitsy Barlow, who confronts his trainer while the man is dining with a bookmaker and a rich man, about an accident involving

‘An Astrologer’s Day’ is a story from the Indian author R. K. Narayan’s 1943 collection Malgudi Days. The Malgudi of the collection’s title is a fictional city in India, where all of the stories in the collection take place. The opening story in the book, ‘An Astrologer’s Day’ is about an unnamed astrologer who is

‘Still I Rise’ is a poem by the American poet Maya Angelou (1928-2014), published in her 1978 collection And Still I Rise. A kind of protest poem which is defiant as well as celebratory, ‘Still I Rise’ is about the power of the human spirit to overcome discrimination and hardship, with Angelou specifically reflecting her

“Then almost at the edge of town, on our way to the Trade Mart where we were going to have the luncheon, we were rounding a curve, going down a hill, and suddenly there was a sharp loud report—a shot. It seemed to me to come from a building right above my shoulder. Then a

Open Source is the world’s longest-running podcast. Christopher Lydon circles the big ideas in culture, the arts and politics with the smartest people in the world. It’s the kind of curious, critical, high-energy conversation we’re all missing nowadays. Try this to get a fresh grip on the war in Ukraine and its effects still to

Is the notion of “authenticity” a fiction? Back in 2010, the Canadian writer Andrew Potter published a book entitled The Authenticity Hoax suggesting that the more we search for what he calls “real things,” the more lost we become. Authenticity is a hoax, Potter argued, because, for all its promise of reality, it is anything

In 1986, after nine years as director of an abortion clinic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Jeanne Clark was ready for a change. She loved running the clinic—managing the staff, supporting the patients, serving the community. She also experienced the darker side of working in the abortion rights movement. Thankfully, no one was home when her house

“Bad” mothers—mothers with complex inner lives and competing priorities who do not always do right by their children—are having a moment in fiction and film. A full sixty years after Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook was first published to the shock-horror of many, a reaction provoked in part by its depiction of “free” (as in,

Perhaps no celebrity, on or off the screen, reflects the knife’s edge that ambitious women must navigate more powerfully than the Academy Award-winning actor Reese Witherspoon. Reflected in the characters Witherspoon has played over the course of her career, her turn to producing films, and her frank public comments are not only the maddening stereotypes

In March 2021, my mother, Nancy Bourne, a lifelong nonsmoker, died of lung cancer. Two weeks before that, though, as she cycled in and out of hospital wards, she was on her laptop sending off a flurry of query letters to literary agents asking for their help in selling her first novel. Six months before

Featured photograph by John Mackenzie. In May 1655, on an otherwise unremarkable day, Thomas Browne—physician and antiquarian—received a visitor. The visitor’s name is lost to history, but they brought with them between forty and fifty clay urns, now also lost, recently discovered buried in a field at Walsingham. Their provenance was a mystery, and Browne

This week’s leak of the Supreme Court vote to strike down Roe v. Wade decision caused waves of outrage across the land: The 1973 decision provided federal constitutional protections of abortion rights. Now it appeared women would be shorn of a guaranteed protection they had had for 49 years. For Alissa Quart, a journalist, producer,

TODAY: In 1893, English socialist, politician, and poet Margaret Isabel Cole (née Postgate) was born in Cambridge, England.     Also on Lit Hub: Lara Bazelon on womanhood and ambition • Beppe Severgnini on the Italian love (and need) for poetry • Read Eyad Barghuthy’s “Curses” (tr. Nashwa Gowanlock)

April 29, 2022, 12:36pm In the exactly 170 years since the first edition of Roget’s thesaurus was published, thesauruses have been a great gift to writers the world over, from frantic high school students trying to subtly change someone else’s words so as not to get caught plagiarizing to poets who have already used “liminal”