November 3, 2020, 1:24pm It has been a long four years. We’ve run scores of important, thought-provoking essays during the Trump Presidency, many of which will endure as crucial documents of this hard, hard time in America.* HOWEVER. One doesn’t have to look far these days for the somber or the elegiac or the thought-provoking
Literature
The signs of growing far-right extremism are all around us, and communities around the globe are struggling to understand how so many people are being radicalized and why they are increasingly attracted to violent movements. Hate in the Homeland (Princeton University Press, 2020) shows how tomorrow’s far-right nationalists are being recruited in surprising places, from
The Princess, a long narrative poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson published in 1847, is not much read or studied now. In the vast editions of Tennyson’s collected works, it languishes unread alongside his plays about Thomas Becket and his various ‘sequel’ poems (‘Mariana in the South’, ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’), although it did go
November 2, 2020, 1:51pm The World Fantasy Awards, established in 1975, honors the best fantasy fiction published during the previous calendar year. The Award is considered one of the most prestigious prizes in the genre of fantasy and speculative fiction, and comes with a small statuette of a tree in front of a tawny full
How To Proceed is a bi-monthly conversation about writing, creativity and the world we live in. Author Linn Ullmann talks to some of the world’s most exciting literary voices about their books, their writing process, and how they view the world and current events around them. We have a globally out of control situation, says
October 30, 2020, 10:29am As the story goes, eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley came up with the idea for Frankenstein one dreary summer night in 1816 while she and the poet Percy Shelley (her then lover, later husband), were vacationing in the Swiss Alps with Lord Byron, who suggested that they pass the time by each writing their
October 30, 2020, 12:08pm Priyanka Chopra, Booker Prize, Armie Hammer, Cold War spies Adam Sandler lost in space, Clooney has a bearded face Here is the week in literary film and TV news. Mindy Kaling is set to star in a HBO adaptation of Jennifer Weiner’s 2001 novel, Good in Bed. * Adam Sandler will
TODAY: In 2004, French publisher Denoël publishes Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française, consisting of two novellas written and set in 1940–1941, from a sequence left unfinished on the author’s death in Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942. The rise of the Great American Conspiracy: Renata Salecl, Jonathan Berman, and Tea Krulos talk anti-vaxxers, QAnon, incels and more. |
October 30, 2020, 12:34pm The voting period is open for the fourth edition of the Albertine Prize, an award administered by the French embassy that invites readers to choose their favorite work of translated Francophone fiction from the previous year. The honorary co-chairs of the prize, author Rachel Kushner and literary critic François Busnel, led
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of a given name in a little-known eighteenth-century poem Here’s a question for you. What connects the girls’ name Vanessa with the classic novel Gulliver’s Travels? The answer: they were both created by the same person. His name was Jonathan Swift
October 30, 2020, 1:33pm On this very day, in 1938, Orson Wells broadcasted an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. It aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System network as a special Halloween episode. It begins like this: “We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century, this world was
Welcome to the virtual book launch of Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Tales of Horror, brought to you by The Antibody Reading Series in collaboration with WORD Bookstore (buy from the bookstore here). Tonight’s guests include editors Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto, along with contributors Meg Elison, Rachel Heng, Troy L. Wiggins, and Stephen Graham Jones. * [embedded
Although Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) – known as ‘Jack’ to his friends and family – is best-known for his seven children’s fantasy novels set in the land of Narnia, C. S. Lewis wrote a number of other works – fiction and non-fiction, science fiction and literary criticism – which have become classics in their field.
October 29, 2020, 1:36pm The late French author Romain Gary is the only writer to have won France’s most prestigious literary award under two names: he received the Prix Goncourt for The Roots of Heaven (Les Racines du ciel; 1956) under his birth name and, more than 20 years later, “Émile Ajar” won the prize for The Life
“Should we watch Rosemary’s Baby?” I asked my partner Monday night. In the moment, I was thinking only of our dwindling window to watch scary movies together; I avoid horror but make an exception for October. Like most classic films I’ve never seen, I had an assumed storyline of the movie in my head, cobbled
Mark Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a masterclass of irony and the way rhetoric can be used to say one thing but imply something quite different without ever naming it. Mark Antony delivers a funeral speech for Julius Caesar following Caesar’s assassination at the hands of Brutus and the conspirators,
October 28, 2020, 1:17pm With the end of the year (unbelievably) approaching, there’s a new opportunity for writers of color to kick off 2021: a new mentorship program, created by some of the most accomplished writers in journalism and literary media today, is taking applications now. The PERIPLUS collective, which aims to support emerging BIPOC
October 27, 2020, 3:39pm This one goes out to all the writers in the Year of our Lord 2020, as we all worry that our total inability to put a sentence together could turn into a lifetime of non-production: It’s never too late. Wole Soyinka, who in 1986 became the first person from sub-Saharan Africa