Poets have often turned their attention to college and school, and in this post we have selected ten of the very best poems about education of various kinds, from poets remembering their schooldays and university years to poets pondering the idea of ‘education’ in a more general, abstract sense. 1. Thomas Gray, ‘Ode on a
Literature
October 20, 2020, 11:09am If you have $5 million to throw around and are looking to up your work-from-home game—by a lot—then this is for you: the beautiful loft in Tribeca that Toni Morrison lived in until her death last year is up for sale and could be yours. Designed by the architect who brought New
October 19, 2020, 1:36pm In 1775, a house was built in Dublin. This house eventually became a home to James Joyce’s great aunts, where they ran a music school in the 1890s. This house, of course (a “dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island”), was immortalized in Joyce’s 1914 short story, “The Dead.” Just in case
‘Mont Blanc’ is one of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most famous poems. ‘Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni’, to give the poem its full title, is an ode to the mountain, the highest mountain in the Alps, and compares the mountain’s mightiness with the power of the human imagination. This makes it a
October 19, 2020, 11:08am How does one browse in a dark bookstore? Picture row upon row of faced-out books lit like tiny billboards floating in an inky black room, small candle lit café tables as little islands of light between hundreds of glowing covers… That’s basically the scene at Wuguan Bookstore in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. The
I miss reading a book, alone, at a bar. I miss sitting in crowded movie theaters, watching horrible film adaptations of wonderful novels. I miss listening to authors read their books, packed in shoulder to shoulder with a small crowd around me, inhaling a writer’s every word. I really miss bookstores. Where I live in
The studio is larger than a studio; though you sleep on a fold-out futon that you do not fold out, there is a separate room with a kitchen and a small table, one you’ve bought for yourself by yourself not with or for him from whom you’ll soon be divorced. The book is on the
TODAY: In 1927, Nobel Prize Laureate Günter Grass is born. “You can feel Daniel Mendelsohn’s own delight in how this project gives him license to wander and roam.” James K.A. Smith on the radical interconnectedness of Three Rings. | Lit Hub Criticism Maybe the secret to writing is… not writing? Johanna Hedva takes an unconventional approach to putting
TODAY: In 1892, David Edelstadt, anarchist poet and editor of the Yiddish anarchist newspaper Fraye Arbeter Shtime, dies at age 26 from tuberculosis. “Lorde’s view of poetry and the imagination clarified my own inclination to disappear, at times, into my own head.” Tracy K. Smith reads Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals. | Lit Hub Biography “The
October 16, 2020, 11:32am Near the end of Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden, the 2019 film adaptation of Jack London’s 1909 novel, released today in the US, a withered Luca Marinelli as Eden tells a bemused audience, “The writer Martin Eden doesn’t exist. He is only a product of your imagination. He’s actually only a hoodlum
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys a slim but beautifully illustrated short from the world(s) of His Dark Materials Philip Pullman’s new book, Serpentine , is not a novel, nor even a novella. Nor is it technically new: it dates from 2004, although it is only being published now.
October 16, 2020, 12:00pm “Why read a book when you can watch a movie adaptation of said book?”, that’s what I always say. Better yet, just watch the trailer. Trailers are so slickly produced these days, it’s no wonder they have their own awards show. More importantly, they condense 90 percent of the story into
October 15, 2020, 3:46pm Here’s one to add to the comically long list of disappointments 2020 has inflicted upon us: Americanah—the hotly-anticipated limited series adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s bestselling novel of the same name—will no longer be moving ahead at HBO. Americanah had been a longtime passion project for Oscar-winning Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o, who was
A ‘hymn’ is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as, variously, ‘a song of praise to God’, ‘any composition in praise of God which is adapted to be chanted or sung’, and ‘an ode or song of praise in honour of a deity, a country, etc.’ Hymns can be religious or secular, in praise of
October 15, 2020, 11:53am Former enfant terrible of the New Jersey screenwriting scene Christopher Moltisanti has, in a characteristically provocative move, returned from the grave this week to endorse Democratic presidential candidate Joseph R. Biden. Once the hot-headed darling of the indie horror film set, Moltisanti, whose debut feature, Cleaver (titled Pork Store Killer in
October 14, 2020, 3:25pm Some dream projects seem inevitable when they actually do happen. That is certainly true of the news that director and producer Ava DuVernay is bringing her feature adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s bestselling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, to Netflix. There was great anticipation for Wilkerson’s follow-up to her modern classic, The
The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare’s most popular comedies, and is widely studied and has been subject to considerable analysis. Contrary to what many people think, the ‘merchant’ of the title isn’t Shylock (of whom more below) but the far less famous character, Antonio. So how well do we know The Merchant of
October 14, 2020, 11:41am This week in films that I just…I just can’t: the first trailer for Ron Howard’s adaptation of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is now live. Based on Vance’s bestselling memoir about growing up in, and then escaping from, an abandoned Rust Belt town ravaged by poverty and drug addiction, the film looks