TODAY: In 1888, John Crowe Ransom, poet, critic, and founder of the Kenyon Review, is born. “To see his name behind one you hadn’t heard of was to be vouched for in the most essential way.” Lauren Cerand remembers Giancarlo DiTrapano. | Lit Hub Leidy Klotz probes the cultural origins of our need to add,
Literature
‘Politics vs Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels’ is a 1946 essay by George Orwell (1903-50). In the essay, Orwell explores Swift’s depiction and view of humanity in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a novel we have analysed here. You can read ‘Politics vs Literature’ in full here, but below we offer a short summary, and analysis,
April 29, 2021, 12:28pm Literature can speak to us. In this case, literally: Danish electronics company Bang & Olufsen has designed a new wireless speaker that resembles a book. The sleek ten-inch tall speaker fits neatly into a bookshelf and is nine hundred dollars. Finally, libraries can be noisy! It may seem like a novelty
TODAY: In 1996, Rent opens on Broadway. A hundred days into Joe Biden’s presidency, Rebecca Solnit looks back to the last presidency: “It was a disorder from which we were forever trying to emerge into order, like people clawing a slimy bank, only to slump back into the ooze.” | Lit Hub Politics “I
‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ is one of the most famous fables attributed to the classical writer Aesop: it gave us the popular idiom to cry wolf, meaning to raise a false alarm. But although the moral meaning of the fable is fairly clear, the story’s effectiveness as a moral fable is less obvious, as
April 28, 2021, 3:13pm Today, the UK’s Women’s Prize for Fiction announced the shortlist for this year’s prize, which seeks to recognize the best fiction written by women every year, to the tune of £30,000, and a bronze figurine known as the “Bessie.” This year, the finalists were selected by a judging panel composed of
TODAY: In 1953, Roberto Bolaño is born. “The atmosphere was mostly awkward silences, slight terror at having their poems chosen for discussion, and equal terror at having them ignored.” When Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton met in (a very relatable) workshop. | Lit Hub Tobias Carroll looks to Ian Sinclair, whose idea of “walking with
Agamemnon is the first play in the Oresteia, the only trilogy of Greek tragedies that has survived intact from classical times. The trilogy is also Aeschylus’ masterpiece: more so than any of his other surviving plays, the Oresteia moves Greek drama into new directions. Indeed, we might go so far as to say that, with
April 27, 2021, 2:20pm As more and more people get vaccinated, I’m both excited for indoor spaces to open back up and grateful for the public outdoor spaces that made this year much more joyful—so I’m obviously obsessed with this forest library that strikes a balance between indoor and outdoor. “Scholar’s Library,” designed by New
As a student of Elissa Washuta’s at Ohio State, I had the distinct pleasure of following the threads of her then-collection-in-progress, White Magic, through her latest preoccupations and ideas about craft. During her office hours, she’d offer me a La Croix and then lean back from her desk to show me the constellation of notecards
‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves’; ‘Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus’. In just over half a dozen lines, Cassius gives us two of the most famous lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. His ‘bestride the narrow world like a Colossus’ speech –
April 26, 2021, 3:55pm George Orwell probably hasn’t stopped spinning in his grave since that Apple Macintosh commercial came out in 1984. You know, the one with the lady in red gym shorts who throws a big old hammer at Big Brother, at which point we are told that 1984 won’t be like “1984” if
TODAY: In 1888, screenwriter and author Anita Loos, best known for her 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, is born. “Hitchcock alone bears responsibility for his acts of predation, though his behavior was thoroughly facilitated and normalized by the culture.” Edward White looks at the director’s treatment of women. | Lit Hub Film Your week
The symbolism of the phoenix ought to be a straightforward matter. There are two things most people know about the phoenix: that it’s a mythical bird, no more real than dragons or unicorns; and that it’s famous for rising from the ashes of its own funeral pyre, symbolising resurrection. However, there are a number of
April 23, 2021, 12:08pm Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery—here’s some good Friday news: in a new study, a team from UT Austin has encoded a quote from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park on a small plastic molecule. The goal of the study was to test the viability of plastics as an efficient data-storing
April 23, 2021, 12:24pm Poetry-heads rejoice, and then leap into action: a handwritten copy of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is currently up for auction through Lion Heart Autographs. The copy is not the original manuscript of the poem, but is nevertheless quite rare; David Lowenherz, president of Lion Heart Autographs,
‘The Birthmark’ is a short story by the nineteenth-century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in 1843. Although not as well-known as ‘Young Goodman Brown’ or ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’, ‘The Birthmark’ is an intriguing tale which, like those more famous stories, contains ambiguous symbolism within its straightforward plot. You can read ‘The Birthmark’ here
TODAY: In 1967, S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders is published by Viking. “I will get my second vaccination in a few weeks and today I wondered if I should practice wearing shoes with heels again.” Ada Limón on preparing the body for a reopened world. | Lit Hub Why does walking help us think? Jeremy DeSilva looks to great writers,