‘Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have / Immortal longings in me’: so begins Cleopatra’s final speech in Shakespeare’s tragedy Antony and Cleopatra. Her ‘immortal longings’ are her longings for immortality, her desire to leave behind the mortal world and enter the next. Curiously, it isn’t clear whether the historical Cleopatra died
Literature
August 2, 2021, 12:29pm When we talk about Raymond Carver, we talk about the short story. Despite having published eight poetry collections before his death (33 years ago to the day), he’s known for works like “Cathedral” and “Why Don’t You Dance.” But, as it turns out, Carver wrote short stories out of practicality, not
As yet another wave of infection blooms and the bitter assignment of vaccine passes becomes a reality, societies are being held hostage by a sadly familiar coalition of the uninformed, the misinformed, the misguided, and the misanthropic. They are making vaccine passports, which no one wants, a likely necessity. Without their noise and narcissism, vaccination
The tragic love story of Dido and Aeneas has been told numerous times, and Henry Purcell famously turned it into one of the first English operas in the late seventeenth century. Dido’s lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is a wonderful piece of music, powerful and moving: you can listen to it here. But unlike
TODAY: In 1924, William H. Gass is born in Fargo, North Dakota. Discovering a piece of the moon’s primordial crust, and other highlights from Apollo 15’s three days in a geologic wonderland. | Lit Hub History If “cities demonstrate their essential character when responding to a crisis,” what will New York City show when
July 30, 2021, 9:52am This Sunday marks Herman Melville’s 202nd birthday, and I decided to honor him by looking through a scholarly book of his correspondence to find something noteworthy to write about (beyond, of course, his passionate love letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne). Why, how do you celebrate birthdays? While much of the correspondence involved either
Like many of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories, the short 1933 story ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ uses its spare, direct dialogue to hint at the relationships between the characters and the themes the story is delicately and obliquely exploring. The story is about an old man who frequents a Spanish café at night, and the two
July 30, 2021, 12:26pm Today, dear readers, is Paperback Book Day! It’s the anniversary of the day that the first Penguin paperback was published in England. Good! Personally, I’ll take paperbacks over hardcovers any old day. Don’t @ me! They’re more affordable. They’re lighter. And they don’t wear book jackets that, while lovely, I personally
July 30, 2021, 12:50pm The Internet has opened up new modes of self-publishing for writers: subscription services like Substack and Patreon, online releases on platforms like Gumroad, and even NFTs. Now, we’re seeing the debut (to my knowledge) of a new self-publishing model: writer Aurora Mattia has published her latest story “Ezekiel in the Snow”
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the prophetic visions of a highly original writer Say ‘Myths of the Near Future’ to many people and they will think of the album by the Klaxons, but the Klaxons named their 2007 debut after a 1982 collection of short stories by J.
July 30, 2021, 1:23pm Sunjeev Sahota’s China Room, Grady Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group, S. A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears, Kristen Radtke’s Seek You, and The Letters of Shirley Jackson all feature among the best reviewed books of the month. Bought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.” Fiction 1. China
Like people, cities demonstrate their essential character when responding to a crisis. As a collection of islands and one-time swamps where the Hudson and East Rivers meet the Atlantic Ocean, New York was reminded of its basic geography in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy’s catastrophic surge brought an extra three meters (ten feet) of seawater into
Poets often find themselves backed into a corner when writing more traditional rhyming poetry. They find they’ve ended a line with the unpromising word ‘orange’ and now have to try to find a word that rhymes with it, or else change the offending word for something more rhyme-friendly. But ‘world’ is a curious example: a
July 29, 2021, 3:53pm It’s been a week of good news for globe-trotting American novelist and travel writer Maggie Shipstead. On Tuesday, Shipstead’s latest novel, Great Circle, made the star-studded longlist for the 2021 Booker Prize, and Deadline has today reported that the book is also set for a small screen adaptation. Great Circle—a decades-spanning work of historical fiction about
The stories we tell our children about climate change are different from those adults tell each other. Middle grade books don’t shy away from formidable and overwhelming real-world forces like villainous corporations, selfish adults, pandemics, and disastrous weather events; they confront climate trauma head-on in order to explore future possibilities. However, these novels are significantly
The miracle of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding at Cana is the first of Jesus’ miracles recounted in the Gospel of John, and as such it marks a decisive moment in the story of Jesus’ divinity. But there are several mysterious details about the story which are worthy of closer analysis, not
July 28, 2021, 2:29pm Well, this is kind of heartwarming. A full quarter-century after shuttering his old store in Bloomington, Indiana, Rick Morgenstern has opened what suddenly becomes the state’s largest independent bookstore. The reboot of the eponymous store has been in the works for years and is reopening in a former Pier 1, of
July 27, 2021, 1:19pm Today marks the 105th birthday of the late Elizabeth Hardwick, sweeping, incisive critic, novelist and short story writer. Festively revisiting her 1985 Art of Fiction interview in The Paris Review, I was pleased but unsurprised to see her response to the now-derided question “[What is it like to be] a woman