The story of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods is, like the story of Pandora’s Box, an important ‘origin-story’ from Greek myth. But there’s much more to Prometheus than the ‘stealing fire’ story. Let’s delve into the world of Greek mythology, from over two thousand years ago, to see why Prometheus is such a central,
Literature
October 27, 2020, 11:05am Here’s an unusual bit of adaptation news: the painter Michaela Yearwood-Dan has created a limited edition cover for the November issue of Harper’s Bazaar‘s Bazaar Art based on Margaret Atwood’s poem “Feather,” from her latest book Dearly, her first collection of poetry in over a decade. You can read the poem here. “I
October 26, 2020, 4:12pm Today, the American Language Association (ALA) announced the longlist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. The prize, established in 2012, honors the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published in the U.S. in the previous year, and comes with a $5,000 purse. Previous
Although the phrase ‘lest we forget’ is now closely associated with Remembrance Sunday and war remembrance more generally, it actually originated in a poem written almost twenty years before the outbreak of the First World War: Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Recessional’. Before we offer a summary and analysis of ‘Recessional’, here’s the text of the poem: Recessional
October 26, 2020, 1:51pm Today, the New York Public Library announced the launch of its latest service, Shelf Help, a tool that provides its patrons with personalized book bundles curated by skilled librarians. Shelf Help is the Library’s latest initiative to support New York City during the pandemic. “There is a wonderful moment of serendipity
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the lasting power of Ovid’s great poem Ovid’s wasn’t the first Metamorphoses. Before him, there was Nicander’s Heteroeumena, whose title is usually translated as ‘metamorphoses’, but Nicander’s poem has been lost. It was Ovid’s vast retelling of the great myths of Greek and
October 23, 2020, 1:06pm I wanted to say something beautifulhow we turn garbage into goldhow we made a swamp fertile landhow we turned a curse, into a blessing. –Abioudun Oyewole * Last Sunday, the English artist Richard Kraft gave Donald Trump nearly 50 penalty cards following one of his weekend rallies. While I watched the
This is episode 18 of The Antibody Reading Series, a weekly reading and Q and A hosted by Brian Gresko. The guests this evening are Angela Chen, Athena Dixon, and Melissa Faliveno. [embedded content] Buy the books featured tonight from your local indie or from Bookshop: Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society,
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, as the old adage has it. But what have poets down the ages had to say about absences of various kinds, whether the absence of a loved one, or other absence of human company? Below, we introduce ten of the very best poems about absence. 1. William Shakespeare, ‘How
October 22, 2020, 1:22pm I can hardly remember what was happening in January of this year, much less what I was doing when I was an 18-year-old. We do have a good sense of what Jane Austen was up to, though. Historians are mostly certain about one thing: Austen was barely an adult when she wrote a
October 21, 2020, 2:12pm Thank you, universe: We’re getting a queer Canadian grunge-era comedy series about Tegan and Sara Quin directed by Clea DuVall, and there’s literally nothing I can do to make that sentence better. The show will be based on High School, the sisters’ memoir of their adolescence in Calgary, published last year by
Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott’s 1819 novel set in late twelfth-century England, has a claim to being the most influential novel of the entire nineteenth century. It was hugely popular, and remains so, with such figures as Tony Blair and Ho Chi Minh both declaring it their favourite novel. Why has Ivanhoe endured, and why did
October 21, 2020, 11:07am Did you know there was a new Tim O’Brien documentary “released” this past spring? Yup, The War and Peace of Tim O’Brien was set to hit the festival circuit over the summer, but we all know what happened next. There was mention of it in this June Esquire profile (which is
October 20, 2020, 1:54pm Oh, the Poe-like irony, a story to strike the freelancer’s heart like a lance. In 1847, a financially struggling Edgar Allan Poe wrote a letter to former Philadelphia mayor, dramatist, magazine editor, and lawyer Robert Taylor Conrad. The missive, noted as one of the highest quality Poe letters to-date, recently sold
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
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