Literature

‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’ This is one of the most famous quotations from George Orwell’s 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The words are spoken by O’Brien, the grand inquisitor of the totalitarian regime in Orwell’s novel. In order to understand the

July 12, 2021, 10:30am Karen Joy Fowler has a knack for writing large dysfunctional families (you might remember her novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize). Her new novel, Booth, is about the Booth family, three members of which remain quite famous

‘The Dog in the Manger’ is one of several fables attributed to the ancient writer Aesop which have become not just famous, but proverbial: the fable has itself become a well-known phrase whose meaning is synonymous with the fable’s moral. However, as with a few other famous ‘Aesop fables’, the attribution to Aesop is shaky

July 9, 2021, 11:16am This week, I stumbled across a hidden internet gem: a seemingly endless collection of fake pulp novel covers for, about, and presumably by, librarians. The series, “Professional Library Literature: Practical Books for Librarians” is a hilarious mix of helpful how-to guides, library-related thrillers, and other useful (and cathartic) topics. (As someone

The story of Moses and the burning bush from the Book of Exodus is a well-known episode in the Old Testament. It is a decisive moment because God reveals his name to Moses: the first time he has spoken his name to anyone. Located on Mount Horeb (better known as Mount Sinai), the burning bush

July 9, 2021, 11:59am If you watched Gilmore Girls for the first time when it was still on air and never stopped watching it, then this list is for you. Personally, I probably think about the Gilmore girls an unhealthy number of times per day, and my obsession is only aided by following my like-minded fanatics

‘Borges and I’ is one of the shortest stories by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, a master of the very short story. In many ways it condenses some of the most distinctive aspects of his work into a very short ‘narrative’. But what is ‘Borges and I’ about, and how should we interpret this

July 9, 2021, 12:19pm If you like your children’s cartoon characters vaguely sinister and uncomfortably sexualized (and I do, perverted Parisian Judge Claude Frollo and suave 1970s fox Robin Hood. God help me, I do), you’ll find this news very welcome indeed. Large, handsome, Oscar-winning Spaniard Javier Bardem is set to star as the titular

‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’: this oft-quoted line from Oscar Wilde was not spoken by Wilde during conversation, as so many of his witty lines were. Instead, ‘we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’ is uttered by

TODAY: In 1931, Alice Munro is born.   The Great Second Half Preview is here, AKA 222 books we want to read before 2022. | Lit Hub From Shakespeare to Lovecraft to Stephen King, Austin Ratner on the glorious, wonderful, and prodigious literature of the rat (and no, a rat did not write this). | Lit Hub Criticism Deus

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of perhaps the greatest cake-based proverb in the English language I remember being flummoxed by a number of well-known proverbs when I was very young. The first time I heard ‘a stitch in time saves nine’, I remember scratching my head

July 9, 2021, 12:33pm Good news for Twainiacs (?) with money to spend: now, for $4.2 million, you can purchase Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens)’s bright yellow Redding, Connecticut mansion where he lived until his death in 1910. Stormfield Mansion, named by Twain himself after his short story “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” was built

In order to save its life, a mother puts her illegitimate baby boy into a boat made of reeds and sets him adrift on the local river, until he is discovered by somebody who rescues the boy and raises him. That boy grows up to be an important ruler of his people. Moses? Well, it

July 9, 2021, 10:00am This weekend will mark the birthday of celebrated author Elwyn Brooks White, otherwise known as E.B. White to the public and “Andy” to his close friends. White was born on July 11, 1899, in Mount Vernon, NY. In 1921, he graduated from Cornell University, where he earned his BA. He earned

‘The Function of Criticism’ is an influential 1923 essay by T. S. Eliot, perhaps the most important poet-critic of the modernist movement. In some ways a follow-up to Eliot’s earlier essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ from four years earlier, ‘The Function of Criticism’ focuses on the role of the critic as opposed to the

July 8, 2021, 1:23pm Serendipitously, just two months away from the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death, Julia Bolton Holloway—a Florence-based researcher and nun—seems to have discovered a sheaf of handwritten Dante manuscripts. The manuscripts date back to Dante’s time spent as a student in Florence, copying out works on the art of government dictated

‘He was my North, my South, my East and West’ is a line from what is probably W. H. Auden’s best-known poem, ‘Funeral Blues’ (as it’s commonly known) or ‘Stop all the clocks’ (as it’s also known, after its opening words). But what is the meaning of this line, and Auden’s poem as a whole?

July 8, 2021, 9:00am Literary Hub is pleased to announce that NoViolet Bulawayo’s second novel, Glory, will be published by Viking on March 8, 2022. Viking describes the new book from the author of We Need New Names (which was shortlisted for the Booker and was also one of our favorite debuts of the decade)