June 10, 2021, 1:34pm Today marks the 93rd birthday of Maurice Sendak, titan of children’s literature, whose kindness and empathy for children shone through in his immersive, vivid body of work as well as in life. In a 1986 Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, later quoted in Applause, Sendak described his favorite compliment from
Literature
The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) never won the Nobel Prize for Literature, nor did he write a novel. But he is widely regarded as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century, was a considerable influence on magic realism, and penned some of the most original, clever, and thought-provoking short stories
TODAY: In 1928, Maurice Sendak is born. MAURICE SENDAK: Genius of American Picture Books, Exhibit and Sale is currently on view at the Society of Illustrators in New York through July 10. Image: © The Maurice Sendak Foundation “Water was always everywhere. And we accepted it. We exalted it. We prayed to it.” Ly Tran
The Book of Jonah is one of the shorter, not to mention more hermeneutically challenging, books of the Old Testament: how should we analyse and interpret this strange tale of a prophet being swallowed by a whale? Was it even a whale? Could the whole Book of Jonah, in fact, be satire? In the latest
June 9, 2021, 1:22pm Much has been made of Kate Winslet’s buzzy transformation into hard-boiled Philadelphia detective Mare for HBO Max’s Mare of Easttown, one of my favorite shows of the year. In The New York Times, Maureen Dowd catalogued every tool used to turn the glamorous Winslet into what Winslet herself described as a
The ‘balcony scene’ in Romeo and Juliet is fake news. ‘O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon’ is one of the most famous lines to appear in this scene, Act 2 Scene 2, but it’s questionable whether Romeo is actually looking up at Juliet on her balcony. We’ll return to this issue of
TODAY: In 1898, German-Italian writer, film-maker, and war correspondent Kurt Erich Suckert, who wrote under the pseudonym Curzio Malaparte, is born. The chunk of chilled rubber seen around the world: how legendary physicist Richard Feynman helped solve the Challenger disaster. | Lit Hub History “I realize now that my sleeplessness coincided with my decision
June 8, 2021, 2:56pm BREAKING NEWS: yesterday, Zooey Deschanel tweeted about Olivia Rodrigo’s hot new album, Sour. Real footage of Olivia Rodrigo crediting me for inspiring her number #1 album. (JK, but great album @Olivia_Rodrigo!) pic.twitter.com/hMDezbLjEL — zooey deschanel (@ZooeyDeschanel) June 7, 2021 She included a GIF from a brief moment in New Girl, lost
‘Banal Story’ is one of the shortest stories Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) ever wrote. Running to just two pages in most editions, the story first appeared in the Little Review magazine in 1926 before being collected in Hemingway’s Men Without Women the following year. Despite its brevity, ‘Banal Story’ has had critics scratching their heads over
TODAY: In 1876, Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, best known by her pseudonym George Sand, dies at 72. Fights with publishers, birthday cards, four drafts of The Life of the Mind: Samantha Rose Hill dwells in Hannah Arendt’s archives. | Lit Hub History “Ethel’s imagined spirit infuses every fiber of what Esther Greenwood is suffering—not simply her imprisonment,
‘If you have tears, prepare to shed them now’: so begins one of Mark Antony’s most famous speeches from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. That line is well-known, but it’s a testament to how many great speeches we find in this play that this isn’t even Mark Antony’s most famous speech from Julius Caesar: that mantle must
June 7, 2021, 1:45pm On Saturday, Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth) joined a cohort of other users in Twitter jail. Her alleged crime? Spreading misinformation about COVID and coronavirus vaccines. Wolf, an unabashed anti-vaxxer, said that the vaccines are actually a “software platform that can receive uploads.” She also claimed, “the best way to show
‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each’ is one of the most famous lines from a poem filled with famous lines. T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ has been called, by the critic Christopher Ricks, the best first poem in a first volume of poems: it opened Eliot’s debut
TODAY: In 1943, Nikki Giovanni is born. “How is it that blindness, in a largely ocular-centric culture such as ours, holds such (metaphorical) power?” M. Leona Godin considers Homer, Borges, and the lived reality of the blind writer. | Lit Hub Rebecca Rego Barry digs through Marlon Brando’s personal library—not decorative objects but true reading
The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot’s landmark 1922 poem, is full of rich symbolism. But its symbolism is also highly ambiguous, making it difficult to explain the poem by appealing to a particular symbol or image alone. Let’s take a closer look at some of the most important symbols in The Waste Land, and what
My nerves felt short-circuited, incapable of the sensory overload I have experienced when holding my newborn son for the first time or carving up powder on a black diamond run at Mt. Bachelor or standing before Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm at the Met or listening to the Stones play “Sympathy for the Devil” live in San
What do the phrases ‘salt of the earth’, ‘light of the world’, ‘God and mammon’, ‘blessed are the meek’, ‘turn the other cheek’, and ‘pearls before swine’ all have in common? Along with another now ubiquitous expressions, they all originate in the same place: the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ teachings to his followers which
The Longest Year: 2020+ is a collection of visual and written essays on 2020, a pivotal year that shifted our way of experiencing the world. In most publications, images work in service to words—here they work in tandem. // In the fifth in the series Mitchell S. Jackson considers photographer Darryl DeAngelo Terrell’s series, Project