Literature

TODAY: In 1984, American playwright Lillian Hellman dies at 79.   Lavinia Liang considers the “Eastern Western,” a growing body of literature that’s reclaiming a xenophobic genre. | Lit Hub Criticism “There are certain novels that have the remarkable quality of being both timely and prophetic.” Margot Livesy on Kathrine Kressmann Taylor’s Address Unknown, which exposed

‘Envy’ is a poem by Mary Lamb, who is best-remembered for her Tales from Shakespeare which she co-authored with her brother, Charles. But she was also a fine poet, who, in ‘Envy’, presents to us an important truth about the nature of envy and the futility of believing the grass always greener on the other

The War of the Worlds is one of H. G. Wells’s early scientific romances: books which helped to lay the groundwork for modern science fiction. One adaptation was supposedly mistaken for a real news broadcast reporting an actual invasion, although we will come to that later on. The War of the Worlds is probably Wells’s most

June 29, 2021, 7:50am Why, you might be asking yourself, do all these introductions begin with some reference to the season or to how hot it is? It’s because that’s all I can think about. The feels-like temperature in Brooklyn is 100 degrees, and even my dog does not want to go outside. Thankfully, there

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ These are among the most famous lines in the New Testament: they begin the Gospel of St. John. But what does ‘In the beginning was the Word’ mean? Let’s take a closer look at the meaning of this

June 28, 2021, 1:43pm Maud Newton, original literary blogger and a valued presence on literary Twitter, will publish a memoir next year that grew out of her Harper’s cover essay, “American’s Ancestry Craze.” Lit Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for that book, Ancestor Trouble. Here’s a description of the book from Random House:

‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne’: so begins perhaps the most famous speech from William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. The words are uttered by Domitius Enobarbus, a follower of Mark Antony, in Act 2 Scene 2, as he describes the appearance of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, when Mark Antony first saw her

“We are a tale we tell ourselves.”–Heidi James, So the Doves* It wasn’t just that they were the only two people I’d heard use the phrase “gussied up.” It wasn’t that they both wrote books that kept you turning the pages right to the end and then wish you hadn’t got there. It wasn’t their

The Tower of Babel is one of the best-known structures mentioned in the Bible. But what was the tower’s purpose, and where was Babel? How much do we really know about this story? In many ways, the Tower of Babel is a kind of ‘just so’ story about how the world came to have many

George Orwell (1903-50) is one of the twentieth century’s most quotable writers. Although many of his most repeated statements come from his essays or from his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, a few of his most famous quotations are found in his 1945 novella, Animal Farm. But the meaning of these quotations is often misunderstood, so

‘Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die’: these lines have become famous, although they’re often misquoted. The quotation originated in the 1854 poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ written by the UK Poet Laureate of the time, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92). Tennyson, who was Poet Laureate for a record

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’ has a curious claim to fame: it’s thought to be the first short story to contain a robotic insect. This intriguing tale is layered and rich in symbolism, so like so many of Hawthorne’s stories it requires some careful close analysis. ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’

According to Oscar Wilde, ‘The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations.’ But as with many stories from the Bible, there are many things we get wrong about that ‘man and woman in a garden’, Adam and Eve. Where was the Garden of Eden? And

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the surprising origins of a well-known phrase Let’s begin this week’s Secret Library column with a quiz question. Which famous writer gave us the phrase ‘one for all, or all for one’? To make it easier, let’s make it multiple-choice. Was it: a)

TODAY: In 1928, Belgian cartoonist Pierre Culliford, who worked under the pseudonym Peyo, best-known for the comic strip The Smurfs, is born.  “It’s a place for writers to publish and earn money directly and instantaneously without any traditional publishing gatekeepers. It’s also a brand-new subculture cut off from a larger writing culture that doesn’t understand it.” Walker

‘Frailty, thy name is woman’ is one of dozens of famous expressions that have entered common speech, but which originated in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The old quip about Hamlet, that it’s ‘too full of quotations’, wittily sums up the play’s influence on not just English literature but on the everyday language we use. Many of

June 24, 2021, 6:14pm The most famous “World’s Greatest Library” ever consumed by fire is that of Alexandria over 2,000 years ago (thanks, Caesar)—we don’t know exactly what was lost but we know that it was a lot. This, perhaps, is what makes such a conflagration particularly tragic: we are tantalized by the eternally unknowable,

The Waste Land is one of the major poems of the twentieth century. Published in 1922, T. S. Eliot’s landmark work of modernism may ‘only’ be just over 430 lines or around 20 pages in length, but its scope and vision are epic in terms of historical and geographical range, spanning from modern-day London to