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
Literature
The Caretaker was Harold Pinter’s first successful play, first staged in 1960 in London. The play is a subtle exploration of madness, power, and the inertia at the core of many people’s lives. But because The Caretaker is such a subtle piece of theatre, it might be worth recapping the plot of the play (if
July 27, 2021, 2:56pm O Sport, pleasure of the Gods, essence of life, you appeared suddenly in the midst of the grey clearing which writhes with the drudgery of modern existence, like the radiant messenger of a past age, when mankind still smiled. And the glimmer of dawn lit up the mountain tops and flecks
July 26, 2021, 1:37pm This past week, the New York Community Trust announced the 2021 winners of its Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, chosen by a committee of theater professionals. The award, one of the nation’s most significant prizes for playwrights, is named after the late theatrical agent Helen Merrill and intended to give recipients
‘Soft you, a word or two before you go’: so begins Othello’s last major speech before he stabs himself. His last words, famously, are ‘I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee’. But between these two lines are a number of other noteworthy moments which call out for closer textual analysis. Let’s go through Othello’s speech,
July 26, 2021, 1:39pm Haruki Murakami’s writing has inspired many creatives’ own practices, from visual artists to video game designers to filmmakers to other writers. And hopefully we’ll be seeing yet another artist-turned-Murakami-enthusiast: Joe Jonas has revealed he’s been reading Murakami as he works on new music. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal,
July 23, 2021, 10:25am In March 2022, Erika Robuck, bestselling historical fiction author, will publish Sisters of Night and Fog, a novel based on the true story of an American socialite and a British secret. The publisher, Berkley, describes it like this: Set across the European theater of WWII, Sisters of Night and Fog tells the
The story of Arachne is one of the most famous of the Greek myths dealing with young women. Or at least, it is perhaps the most famous one not to involve the young woman either being carried off by Zeus (who had something of a reputation for doing that) or falling in love with someone
July 23, 2021, 11:45am “I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.” Today marks the 133rd anniversary of the birth of Raymond Chandler, patron saint of Los Angeles noir and perhaps the most famous crime fiction writer of all time. Each of his nine novels, from The Big Sleep (1939) to the posthumously
‘The Judgment’, written in 1912, was in many ways Franz Kafka’s breakthrough work. In this short story, a man writes to his friend who is living in Russia. He then speaks to his father, who questions whether the friend even exists. At the end of the story, the man’s father condemns his son to death
July 23, 2021, 11:51am Yesterday, the Belarusian Justice Ministry moved to shut down PEN Belarus, sister organization of PEN America currently run by Nobel winner Svetlana Alexievich. This news comes amid widespread crackdowns on civil society activists and independent media by the Belarusian government this week, which president Alexander Lukashenko described as a “mopping-up operation”
TODAY: In 1900, Zelda Fitzgerald, neé Sayre, is born. An unknown genius with a trunk full of poems: Richard Zenith on the mysteries and identities of Fernando Pessoa. | Lit Hub Biography “I arrive now at the end of this journey with a finished film that I’ll happily admit cannot do justice to the well from
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle ponders the links between famous writers and advertising slogans Fay Weldon, author of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), is one of several famous novelists who started out in the field of advertising. In this connection she is probably most famous for
July 23, 2021, 12:35pm Good news for fans of Elvis, or Kahlil Gibran, or annotation: Elvis Presley’s annotated copy of Kahlil Gibran’s prose poem collection The Prophet is on sale now from Peter Harrington for £19,500. Presley loved The Prophet, reading it so often that he memorized it; he gave annotated copies to several friends.
What is ‘manna’ from heaven? Manna is the name given to the food the Israelites ate during the wilderness wanderings recounted in Exodus chapter 16, following the parting of the Red Sea after the Israelites’ escape out of Egypt, where they had been kept as slaves of the Egyptians. But what precisely is manna? Let’s
July 23, 2021, 1:02pm Under its new “Read in Color” initiative, the Little Free Library is partnering with Brilliant Detroit—an organization which provides children educational programming and support in high-need Detroit neighborhoods—to bring thousands of diverse books to Detroit neighborhoods through Little Free Library boxes. Fourteen book-sharing boxes stocked with 2,500 books will be installed
Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry, also known as The Defence of Poesy, was written in 1579-80). It has at least one great claim to fame: it’s the first work of ‘literary criticism’ in English. Sidney’s essay is an ‘apology’ for, or defence of, the art of poetry, but Sidney was inspired to write
July 22, 2021, 3:03pm Ring the alarum-bell! It’s your first look at Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand as literature’s favorite murderous power couple, the Macbeths. (Unrelated: should someone should write a contemporary adaptation in which Lady Macbeth is a #GirlBoss and Macduff is a journalist at Business Insider?) Along with the photo came the announcement