March 31, 2021, 3:25pm The year from hell has turned out to be a hell of a year for Eisner Award-winning cartoonist and New Yorker illustrator Adrian Tomine. First, his graphic memoir, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, got a pretty rapturous critical reception upon its release back in June. Then, three months later, it
Literature
Midas is known for two things: being given the ears of an ass, and turning everything he touched into gold. The latter of these was his reward from Dionysus, although he soon discovered that his gift was a bane rather than a blessing, and that he couldn’t even do simple things like take a drink
TODAY: In 1855, Charlotte Brontë, English novelist and poet and the eldest of the three Brontë sisters whose novels became classics of English literature, dies. “What would it mean to make caring for others into an explicitly public priority?” Reading Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through amid a national mental health crisis. | Public
March 30, 2021, 1:31pm This past Thursday, Seattle law firm Hagens Berman filed a proposed class-action lawsuit on behalf of Illinois bookseller Bookends & Beginnings, alleging Amazon colluded to fix prices on print books. The suit claims that Amazon’s restrictive contracts with the “Big Five” publishers have made it impossible for book retailers to beat
The Great Gatsby is the quintessential Jazz Age novel, capturing a mood and a moment in American history in the 1920s, after the end of the First World War. Rather surprisingly, The Great Gatsby sold no more than 25,000 copies in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lifetime. It has now sold over 25 million copies. How did this
March 30, 2021, 10:00am Richard Garriott has had the kind of career that kids aim for before the world tells them it’s unrealistic. In addition to his work as a video game creator, Garriott is a lifelong explorer (the new president-elect of the Explorer’s Club, in fact) who has traversed both poles of the earth,
March 29, 2021, 2:51pm I am sorry to report that there is a new controversial TikTok making its way around the literary internet. The reddest flags. https://t.co/nYn9bpzq7P pic.twitter.com/vt8TJkaoFl — Joanna Robinson 🇺🇸✌️🏳️🌈 (@jowrotethis) March 28, 2021 There’s a lot to unpack here—the song, the dreamcatcher, the fact this post came from a “Seamus Heaney stan
‘Shooting an Elephant’ is a 1936 essay by George Orwell (1903-50), about his time as a young policeman in Burma, which was then part of the British empire. The essay explores an apparent paradox about the behaviour of Europeans, who supposedly have the power over their colonial subjects. Before we offer an analysis of Orwell’s
March 29, 2021, 10:25am Only three months after the high-profile merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, The New York Times reported earlier this morning that HarperCollins, one of publishing’s “Big Five,” will acquire Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books and Media—Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s trade publishing division—for $349 million. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s revenue fell over
March 26, 2021, 2:40pm Two franchises alike in type of work,One Marvel, one that puts out parodies,That’s called Quirk Books, the main word being “quirk”;They’re behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies— From forth their fertile loins comes a collabWhich any real specific purpose shirks;IPs embracing named this money grabWilliam Shakespeare’s Avengers: The Complete Works. Exit
Perhaps the two most important and prominent qualities which dogs have symbolised in literature and myth down the ages are vigilance and loyalty. However, there are also some curious and lesser-known aspects of dog-symbolism which are worth probing; we’ll get to these in time. As the vast and informative The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols (Penguin
Plucky heroines abound across Anglo and American children’s literature, yet their own struggles with gendered strictures and the trajectories of their comings-of-age often present conflicting narratives. Perhaps one of the most uncompromising—and uncompromised—children’s heroines from the twentieth century is Pippi Longstocking, literary creation of Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren. Disgusted by the ways in which adults
Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories written by James Joyce and published in 1914. As we’ve remarked before, Dubliners is now regarded as one of the landmark texts of modernist literature, but initially sales were poor, with just 379 copies being sold in the first year (famously, 120 of these were bought by
TODAY: In 1931, the English writer Arnold Bennett dies of typhoid in London, shortly after a visit to Paris, where he drank local water in an attempt to prove it was safe. “People who buy books! What a special category of souls.” Nicola DeRobertis-Theye on coming of age in a struggling Berkeley Bookstore. | Lit Hub
March 27, 2021, 9:47am Legend of children’s literature Beverly Cleary died on March 25th in Carmel, California, HarperCollins announced on Friday. She was 104. Since publishing Henry Huggins in 1950, when she was a librarian, Cleary has sold 85 million copies of her books, which have been translated into 29 different languages. She won the National Book
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores perhaps the most enigmatic inscription in a book of poems ‘To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets’: so begins perhaps the most puzzling poetic dedication in all of English literature. Here it is, in full: TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.THESE.INSVING.SONNETS.MR.W.H.ALL.HAPPINESSE.AND.THAT.ETERNITIE.PROMISED.BY.OVR.EVER-LIVING.POET.WISHETH.THE.WELL-WISHING.ADVENTVRER.IN.SETTING.FORTH.T.T. This is the dedication to the
March 26, 2021, 3:40pm Dear reader, I know what you are thinking! Isn’t Women’s History Month basically over? Isn’t it a little too late for this listicle? No! To put this reading list before you at the very beginning of the month would be to subscribe to the idea that March is the set time
March 26, 2021, 10:00am I write prose, not poetry, but the most helpful piece of advice I’ve ever read was written by a poet: Robert Frost, who was born 147 years ago today. In the second, expanded edition of his Collected Poems, published in 1939, Frost included an introductory essay called “The Figure a Poem Makes.”