Literature

July 14, 2021, 10:30am In 2006, Roberto Bolaño, who died 18 years ago this week, published a list of “advice on the art of writing short stories” in World Literature Today. The mini essay was translated by David Draper Clark; the original Spanish version was published in Bolaño’s 2004 essay collection Entre Parèntesis. The advice

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) has been called everything from a modernist to an existentialist, a fantasy writer to a realist. His work almost stands alone as its own subgenre, and the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ – whose meaning, like the meaning of Kafka’s work, is hard to pin down – has become well-known even to people who have

July 13, 2021, 2:19pm The Alaska Library Catalog allows Alaska’s libraries to borrow and lend materials to each other. Library patrons in Alaska have the Alaska Library Catalog to thank for their access to 3.2 million books, rather than just the contents of their local library. But this month, as part of a series of

‘Two roads diverged in a wood’; ‘I took the one less traveled by’. These two lines have become famous since they were written, and they are widely quoted. But their meaning is also widely misunderstood. What did Robert Frost mean when he wrote, ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, / I took the

TODAY: In 1904, Pablo Neruda is born.   “A part of me still believes it isn’t possible to be a brown writer and also be funny and also be taken seriously. But I’ve taken the leap and put my name on this book.” Tahmima Anam on the serious business of being funny. | Lit Hub

‘If We Shadows Have Offended’ is the opening line of Puck’s closing speech from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In summary, the speech sees Puck (also known as Robin Goodfellow) seeking forgiveness from the audience if the fairies (including Puck himself) have ‘offended’ any of the audience with their antics. Before we take a closer

July 12, 2021, 12:55pm Since its publication, Queenie, the 2019 debut novel from Vintage senior marketing executive Candice Carty-Williams, has been repeatedly compared to Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. Kirkus’s starred review called it “A black Bridget Jones, perfectly of the moment.” Entertainment Weekly echoed the praise and noted the similarities between Queenie Jenkins and

‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’ This is one of the most famous quotations from George Orwell’s 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The words are spoken by O’Brien, the grand inquisitor of the totalitarian regime in Orwell’s novel. In order to understand the

July 12, 2021, 10:30am Karen Joy Fowler has a knack for writing large dysfunctional families (you might remember her novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize). Her new novel, Booth, is about the Booth family, three members of which remain quite famous

‘The Dog in the Manger’ is one of several fables attributed to the ancient writer Aesop which have become not just famous, but proverbial: the fable has itself become a well-known phrase whose meaning is synonymous with the fable’s moral. However, as with a few other famous ‘Aesop fables’, the attribution to Aesop is shaky

July 9, 2021, 11:16am This week, I stumbled across a hidden internet gem: a seemingly endless collection of fake pulp novel covers for, about, and presumably by, librarians. The series, “Professional Library Literature: Practical Books for Librarians” is a hilarious mix of helpful how-to guides, library-related thrillers, and other useful (and cathartic) topics. (As someone

The story of Moses and the burning bush from the Book of Exodus is a well-known episode in the Old Testament. It is a decisive moment because God reveals his name to Moses: the first time he has spoken his name to anyone. Located on Mount Horeb (better known as Mount Sinai), the burning bush

July 9, 2021, 11:59am If you watched Gilmore Girls for the first time when it was still on air and never stopped watching it, then this list is for you. Personally, I probably think about the Gilmore girls an unhealthy number of times per day, and my obsession is only aided by following my like-minded fanatics

‘Borges and I’ is one of the shortest stories by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, a master of the very short story. In many ways it condenses some of the most distinctive aspects of his work into a very short ‘narrative’. But what is ‘Borges and I’ about, and how should we interpret this

July 9, 2021, 12:19pm If you like your children’s cartoon characters vaguely sinister and uncomfortably sexualized (and I do, perverted Parisian Judge Claude Frollo and suave 1970s fox Robin Hood. God help me, I do), you’ll find this news very welcome indeed. Large, handsome, Oscar-winning Spaniard Javier Bardem is set to star as the titular

‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’: this oft-quoted line from Oscar Wilde was not spoken by Wilde during conversation, as so many of his witty lines were. Instead, ‘we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’ is uttered by

TODAY: In 1931, Alice Munro is born.   The Great Second Half Preview is here, AKA 222 books we want to read before 2022. | Lit Hub From Shakespeare to Lovecraft to Stephen King, Austin Ratner on the glorious, wonderful, and prodigious literature of the rat (and no, a rat did not write this). | Lit Hub Criticism Deus

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of perhaps the greatest cake-based proverb in the English language I remember being flummoxed by a number of well-known proverbs when I was very young. The first time I heard ‘a stitch in time saves nine’, I remember scratching my head