February 10, 2021, 12:59pm On October 5, this timeline will be blessed/cursed by Jonathan Franzen’s first novel since 2015: Crossroads, or, if you’re not abbreviating, Crossroads: A Novel: A Key to All Mythologies, Volume 1. It’s the first novel of a trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, which, yes, nods to the doomed scholarly project
Literature
Why do we have summer and winter? Although we now have a much fuller understanding of how the orbit of the Earth around the Sun creates the various seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, our ancient ancestors did not have that detailed scientific knowledge. For the ancient Greeks, it was thanks to Persephone, the
February 10, 2021, 11:43am Today, PEN America announced the finalists for its 2021 Literary Awards, which recognizes and honors “dynamic, imaginative, and thought-provoking” books published in the last year. Previous winners include Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Imani Perry, and Yiyun Li. The 55 finalists were selected across 11 categories—PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, Open Book Award, Prize for
February 9, 2021, 4:03pm Beloved Mexican-American actor and restauranteur Danny Trejo’s first memoir, Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood—which details Trejo’s path from drug addiction and incarceration in some of America’s most notorious prisons (including San Quentin, Folsom, and Soledad), to unexpected Hollywood fame in his 40s—will be released by Atria Books on July
The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s one novel, published originally in 1890 (as a serial) and then in book form the following year. The novel is at once an example of late Victorian Gothic horror and, in some ways, the greatest English-language novel about decadence and aestheticism, or ‘art for art’s sake’. To
February 9, 2021, 11:26am As we all know, the worst thing to happen to mainstream American cinema in the 21st century was the near-total abandonment of that most compelling and enigmatic of subgenres: the erotic thriller. While there have been a few notable additions to the canon over the past two decades (In the Cut,
February 8, 2021, 12:27pm The latest TikTok trend is surprisingly old-school: it’s a book. Last week, Sherry Argov’s 2002 relationship guide Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman’s Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship made the Sunday Times bestseller list for the first time since its release nearly a decade ago, thanks
Act 2 Scene 3 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is often known as ‘the Porter scene’. The Porter, the one comic turn in an otherwise overwhelmingly dark and violent play, dominates the scene, as well as making reference to the most momentous event of 1605, the shock of which would have been fresh in the minds
February 8, 2021, 10:12am Last night, as you may or may not know if you’re reading this space, was the Super Bowl. As you probably do know, this year was the first time the Super Bowl included a poetry performance—and of course, it was America’s newest literary darling Amanda Gorman. Gorman, who recently became the
February 5, 2021, 11:37am There’s so much contemporary fiction released every day, it’s hard to keep track—and it’s hard to know which works will still be remembered in a year and which will slip into obscurity. Luckily, we have George Saunders to guide us. In an interview with Los Angeles Review of Books, Saunders was
Poets have often written about the days of chivalry, giving us gripping narrative poems about noble knights and brave kings, or romantic lyrics about knights saving damsels … or being brought under seductive women’s spells. Below, we introduce ten of the very best poems about chivalry, knights, and noble deeds from a bygone era. 1.
February 5, 2021, 12:47pm For some reason, it looks like publishers are already eager to sign book deals about the rogue Reddit users who bought up all that GameStop stock. In case you’ve been living under a rock or willfully ignoring the Internet (I applaud you), here’s a quick refresher on the situation, as I
February 5, 2021, 3:02pm Earlier this afternoon EW gave us our first look at one of the most anticipated literary adaptations of the year: HBO’s Made for Love. The TV series adaptation of Tampa-author Alissa Nutting’s deranged and darkly comic 2017 novel stars Cristin Militoni (Palm Springs, Fargo, How I Met Your Mother) as Hazel
‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ is a short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story, narrated as a non-fiction account by the fictional Menard’s equally fictional friend, sees the title character attempting to write the whole of Miguel de Cervantes’ seventeenth-century novel Don Quixote. The story is witty, funny, and absurdist
TODAY: In 1995, poet James Merrill, dies. “Some writers’ work has managed to be politically charged in subtle, strange ways.” Tobias Carroll wonders what makes a political novel last? | Lit Hub Criticism “I have never met a lonelier person than someone suffering with pain.” One physician’s approach to the nebulousness of chronic pain. | Lit Hub Health Anna Malaika Tubbs reflects on the
February 5, 2021, 3:21pm Much has been made of the fact that Samantha will not be appearing in And Just Like That…, the HBO Max reboot of Sex and the City, but luckily, the show will have a Samantha behind the scenes—Samantha Irby. In addition to her TV writing work, Irby has written four books,
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning of Orwell’s famous six-line slogan, ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’ The six-line sentence ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ is one of the two widely known lines from George Orwell’s 1945 novella Animal Farm – the other being ‘all animals
February 5, 2021, 9:30am Because it’s a pandemic, we have a new baby, and we already finished Top Chef, my husband and I have been watching Sex and the City. It’s his first time watching it, but—yes, I am a white woman in my 30s—not mine. I owned all the DVDs in college, before all TV