Literature

TODAY: In 1996, Haruki Murakami completes his first ultramarathon.   What’s in an epigraph, anyway? Thomas Swick in praise of that “ceremonial gate.” | Lit Hub “Medicine needs to become actively antiracist.” Elinor Cleghorn on healthcare’s insidious race and gender problem. | Lit Hub Health How is it that we’re capable of imitating consciousness, yet

‘Hills Like White Elephants’ (1927) is one of Ernest Hemingway’s best-known and most critically acclaimed short stories. In just five pages, Hemingway uses his trademark style – plain dialogue and description offered in short, clipped sentences – to expose an unspoken subject that a man and a young woman are discussing. You can read ‘Hills

June 22, 2021, 1:37pm Last month, Sotheby’s announced that a collection of rare Brontë-affiliated manuscripts, most notably a volume of 31 handwritten poems by Emily Brontë, was slated for auction along with other manuscripts by Robert Burns and Walter Scott. Now, Sotheby’s has agreed to delay their auction, as a group of British libraries and

Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks during October and November 1843, and the novella (technically, it is not counted among his novels) appeared just in time for Christmas, on 19 December. The book’s effect was immediate. The Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle went straight out and bought himself a turkey after reading A Christmas Carol, and

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ is perhaps the most famous statement John Keats ever wrote. But what do these words mean? They form part of the concluding couplet to his poem ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, perhaps the most famous of his five Odes which he composed in 1819, which was something of an annus

June 22, 2021, 10:00am On this day in 1947, the groundbreaking writer Octavia E. Butler was born in Pasadena, California. At age 48, Butler was the first sci-fi writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship. Butler’s work explored issues that still impact society, such as capitalism, racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, climate change, and religion. Her seminal

TODAY: In 1948, Ian McEwan is born.    “I think I pulled out a ridiculous number of air potato tubers, like 4000 of them. That was a revelation too.” Jeff VanderMeer and Lili Taylor talk books, birds, and beauty. | Lit Hub From Gramercy Park to “Scrabble Corner,” Joshua Jelly-Schapiro on the rich etymologies of place-names. |

Horses have been the close and useful companions and servants of humans for many millennia, and over that time they have become associated with a number of symbolic properties. But what is the symbolic significance of the horse in literature and mythology? Let’s take a closer look at the symbolism of horses down the ages.

Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez Rebecca Hall, JD, PhD, is a scholar, activist, and educator. After graduating Berkeley Law in 1989, she represented low-income tenants and homeless families for eight years before returning to get her PhD in history. She has taught at UC Santa Cruz, Berkeley Law, Berkeley’s history department, and as a visiting

Let’s begin with a quiz question. How many people did Jesus feed with the bread and fishes in the famous miracle recounted in the New Testament? a) 5,000 peopleb) 4,000 menc) more than 5,000 people The answer is, depending on which part of the New Testament you consult, either b) or c), but not a).

Although characters seem to live in fictional worlds the way people exist in reality, a story’s cast is as artificial as a ballet troupe—a society choreographed to meet an author’s purpose. And what is that purpose? Why do writers do this? Why create human facsimiles? Why not spend our days with friends and family, content

‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ is a fairy tale by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), included in his 1888 collection The Happy Prince and Other Tales. Whereas ‘The Selfish Giant’ (from the same collection) deals with Christian love and the title story is about socialism and kindness towards others in society, ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ is

June 18, 2021, 10:00am The other day, I sat down to watch What a Girl Wants. In case you were living under a rock in the early 2000s, the film follows a young Amanda Bynes, the daughter of a hippie wedding singer, who dreads watching the ceremonious Father Daughter Dance because she does not know her

‘Man is the only creature that consumes without producing’ is a quotation from George Orwell’s 1945 novella Animal Farm: a book that is both beast fable and allegory for Soviet Communism. But Orwell’s aim in Animal Farm was to show how the ideals informing the Russian Revolution of 1917 had become corrupted through greed and

TODAY: In 1947, Salman Rushdie is born. Benjamin Hedin considers The Lives of Girls and Women, the genre-curious book that “tells us how Alice Munro became Alice Munro.” | Lit Hub Criticism How Edgar Allan Poe’s 1844 balloon hoax launched a “powerful if chaotic machine of publicity, doubt, and belief.” | Lit Hub History Neal

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the curious meanings of Julius Caesar’s ‘dying words’ Let’s kick off this week’s Secret Library column with a short quiz about those three famous words: ‘Et tu, Brute?’ Okay, if you’re ready … Question 1): Which famous Roman emperor uttered these words when

To say there are “two Americas” immediately calls to mind any number of great sociocultural divides—Black/white, rich/poor, urban/rural—but one of the abiding tensions in this country has long been between civic conformity and individual eccentricity; or, if we are to locate these ideas as places in the American imagination: Suburbia and Bohemia. This particular divide—very

Say the name ‘Mary Magdalene’ to most people and they will say that she was present at the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus in the New Testament narrative. The other thing people might say is, ‘Wasn’t she a prostitute?’ The first of these is true while the second is more complicated. Who was Mary Magdalene?