Literature

April 23, 2021, 12:45pm Want to read what everyone else is reading? MarketWatch reports that in honor of World Book Day, Amazon has released a list of their 50 overall bestselling books in the U.S. (at least in the 27 years since their launch in 1994). Of course, not everyone buys their books on Amazon

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses one of the most famous lines from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety’: these words are among the most well-known and oft-quoted from William Shakespeare’s late tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra, about the love affair between

April 23, 2021, 1:03pm Exciting news: Tibet’s ancient books protection center has uploaded over twenty thousand folios of rare, ancient books and documents to the Tibet Library’s official website. Users are able to search, copy and download all documents for free. This is a major step forward for archive accessibility—for researchers, history enthusiasts, and simply

TODAY: In 1896, English novelist Margaret Kennedy is born.  Kate Aronoff draws a line from the Green New Deal back to FDR’s New Deal, which “reimagined what the US government could do, what it was for, and who it served.” | Lit Hub Politics “The things that mark you will come out in your work;

One of the most important and influential American writers of the nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) was a descendant of John Hathorne, one of the judges at the Salem witch trials of 1692. And New England Puritanism is very much at the heart of his work. He’s regarded by many critics as the first major

April 22, 2021, 2:16pm If you’ve been seeing headlines this week that say things like “Jane Austen canceled for drinking tea” and “Woke Madness! Jane Austen under historical interrogation,” and are a.) worried or b.) simply confused, let me clear things up: Jane Austen has not been canceled for drinking tea, and there is no

The following is excerpted from Fiona Mozley’s latest novel, Hot Stew, about wealth and inheritance, gender and power, and the things women must do to survive in an unjust world. Mozley was born in East London and raised in York, in the North of England. She studied history at Cambridge and then lived in Buenos

Of all of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales for children, ‘The Selfish Giant’ has the strongest Christian symbolism and is clearly meant to be read and analysed as an allegory for Christian love. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the story and its meaning and imagery. You can read ‘The Selfish Giant’ here

In The Phantom Tollbooth, Milo—the child-hero driving through a world of word and number play—accidentally enters a low, dull place. The world loses all its color, everything becoming “grayer and monotonous.” He feels drowsy, his car won’t move, and finally he comes to a dead stop. He has strayed into this land of stasis by

There is a famous anecdote about Lewis Carroll and Queen Victoria: Victoria enjoyed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) so much that she requested a first edition of Carroll’s next book. Carroll duly sent her a copy of the next book he published – a mathematical work with the exciting title An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.

For some, home is the house they grew up in. For others, it’s a country or a nation. Some find it in family, or in the arms of a lover, while others believe it’s where we go when we die. Some say home is the “pale blue dot” that is our planet, and still others

‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’ is a poem by Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-84), who was the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in 1773 when she was probably still in her early twenties. Because Wheatley stands at the beginning of a long

April 19, 2021, 2:34pm Sometimes the Internet is . . . good? Case in point: today, the algorithm directed me to this speedy visual recap of Pride and Prejudice, explained in the (cherry-picked) dulcet tones of John Mulaney. And you thought there was nothing left to mash up with Jane Austen! (Reader, there’s always something

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks

Apples are a common fruit, and so it’s little surprise that apples have come to have powerful and distinctive symbolic properties in works of literature, religion, and myth over the centuries. But there are a number of misconceptions and wrong assumptions about apple-symbolism. How can we tell the bad apples from the rest? In this

April 16, 2021, 11:48am Beware—there’s a new wave of COVID! It’s novels. The latest writer to be infected is Super Sad True Love Story author Gary Shteyngart, whose newly announced novel Our Country Friends follows the shifting relationships of a group of friends at a country house in upstate New York as they hide from

April 16, 2021, 12:55pm Tomorrow marks the 124th birthday of Thornton Wilder—and we’re celebrating by watching the opening monologue of the formally innovative Our Town delivered by another theatrical innovator, Spalding Gray. Spalding Gray as the Narrator in Our Town seems like perfect casting: Gray was known for his solo monologues, like Swimming to Cambodia,

‘The Lost Decade’ is one of the shortest works by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), the American author best-known for The Great Gatsby. Published in Esquire magazine in December 1939, just one year before Fitzgerald died, ‘The Lost Decade’ is one of his most powerful short stories to deal with the effects of drink and the