Lady Macbeth’s speech beginning ‘We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we’ll not fail’ comes at the end of Act 1 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Lady Macbeth’s words come just after she has taunted her husband for his perceived lack of manliness, because he is now vacillating and having second thoughts about
Literature
August 9, 2021, 7:05am Electric Literature has announced their new editor-in-chief: Denne Michele Norris, formerly a Senior Fiction Editor at The Rumpus and Fiction Editor at Apogee Journal, and cohost of the popular, NYT-lauded podcast Food 4 Thot. According to a press release, in her role at Electric Literature, Norris will be the first Black
August 6, 2021, 10:37am Truman Capote never finished his last novel. He signed a contract for the book, which he described as a “dark comedy of the very rich” and compared to In Search of Lost Time, in 1966 (and renegotiated it twice, somehow getting more money each time), but only managed to publish a
‘The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs’ is a well-known phrase, derived from one of the classical writer Aesop’s best-known fables. A fable, of course, is a short story with a moral, and the story usually involves animals. ‘The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs’ fits all of these criteria. But what is the moral
August 6, 2021, 12:28pm The new wave of COVID-related novels has already infected Gary Shteyngart, Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, and Dave Eggers—and the latest writer to succumb might be Stephen King. In an appearance on The View to promote his new crime novel Billy Summers, King announced his plans to tackle COVID in novel form.
Ron Nyren’s The Book of Lost Light—winner of Black Lawrence Press’s 2019 Big Moose Prize and finalist in the 2020 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction—tells the story of Joseph Kylander, whose childhood in early 20th-century San Francisco has been shaped by his widowed father’s obsessive photographic project and by his headstrong
‘Before the Law’ is a short story or parable by the German-language Bohemian (now Czech) author Franz Kafka (1883-1924). It was published in 1915 and later included in Kafka’s (posthumously published) novel The Trial, where its meaning is discussed by the protagonist Josef K. and a priest he meets in a cathedral. ‘Before the Law’
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. * That blood-red full moon of July looked for sure to be on fire, but only because
August 6, 2021, 1:05pm Multihyphenates can get a bad rap, accused of not committing to one thing: operating in the gig economy, creators can feel pressure to specialize. But just because many artists are canonized in one discipline doesn’t mean they didn’t work in others. For instance, before Flannery O’Connor—who died this week in 1964—was
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the famous opening sentence of Orwell’s final novel ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ Since those words were first published in 1949 before Slot Online revealed, they have joined the pantheon, the literary canon, of
TODAY: In 1934, American Beat poet Diane di Prima is born. “It’s as if Smith knew what was coming and wanted us to have good company.” Sara Batkie on reading Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet during the past year of COVID-19. | Lit Hub Year in Reading Lucy Jones enumerates the science-based health benefits of enjoying
‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ is an essay by T. S. Eliot; it began life as an address Eliot gave to the Shakespeare Association on 18 March 1927 before being published on 22 September of that year. Although it is Eliot’s poetry that has endured, and his reputation as a perceptive and provocative critic
August 5, 2021, 1:13pm In early 2022, the scholar collective Post45 will release a cluster of writing, helmed by guest editors Sarah Osment and David Hering, on David Berman. As Post45’s cluster structure dictates, many different thinkers’ short essays on the work of the poet and Silver Jews musician will be released together. The upcoming
This week on The Maris Review, Kelsey McKinney joins Maris Kreizman to discuss her new novel, God Spare the Girls, out now from William Morrow & Co. *On leaving the church: KM: What was interesting for me about growing up and growing out of the faith that I grew up in was recognizing that while
The story of Jesus casting out the demons from a man and into a herd of swine is well-known, but where it happened, and what it means, are more contentious questions and deserve fuller analysis and discussion. The longest and most detailed account of Jesus and the Gadarene swine is found in the Gospel of
August 4, 2021, 2:51pm Today on Instagram, Hanya Yanagihara shared the cover of her next novel, To Paradise, which will be published by Doubleday on January 11, 2022. Yanagihara, who is not only a novelist but the editor in chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, has a well-honed aesthetic sense, and a
TODAY: In 1792, Percy Bysshe Shelley is born. “Driving around the mountain roads, I could hear the quiet around me, and it sounded like the foreboding, slinky, synthesizer-filled theme song to Twin Peaks.” Stephen Kurczy visits the “Log Lady” of the Quiet Zone. | Lit Hub American policing is operating exactly as it was designed to, writes
First published in 1899, Heart of Darkness – which formed the basis of the 1979 Vietnam war film Apocalypse Now – is one of the first recognisably modernist works of literature in English fiction. Its author was the Polish-born Joseph Conrad, and English wasn’t his first language (or even, for that matter, his second). As