Literature

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of a given name in a little-known eighteenth-century poem Here’s a question for you. What connects the girls’ name Vanessa with the classic novel Gulliver’s Travels? The answer: they were both created by the same person. His name was Jonathan Swift
0 Comments
Welcome to the virtual book launch of Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Tales of Horror, brought to you by The Antibody Reading Series in collaboration with WORD Bookstore (buy from the bookstore here). Tonight’s guests include editors Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto, along with contributors Meg Elison, Rachel Heng, Troy L. Wiggins, and Stephen Graham Jones. * [embedded
0 Comments
Although Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) – known as ‘Jack’ to his friends and family – is best-known for his seven children’s fantasy novels set in the land of Narnia, C. S. Lewis wrote a number of other works – fiction and non-fiction, science fiction and literary criticism – which have become classics in their field.
0 Comments
Mark Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a masterclass of irony and the way rhetoric can be used to say one thing but imply something quite different without ever naming it. Mark Antony delivers a funeral speech for Julius Caesar following Caesar’s assassination at the hands of Brutus and the conspirators,
0 Comments
The story of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods is, like the story of Pandora’s Box, an important ‘origin-story’ from Greek myth. But there’s much more to Prometheus than the ‘stealing fire’ story. Let’s delve into the world of Greek mythology, from over two thousand years ago, to see why Prometheus is such a central,
0 Comments
October 26, 2020, 4:12pm Today, the American Language Association (ALA) announced the longlist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. The prize, established in 2012, honors the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published in the U.S. in the previous year, and comes with a $5,000 purse. Previous
0 Comments
Although the phrase ‘lest we forget’ is now closely associated with Remembrance Sunday and war remembrance more generally, it actually originated in a poem written almost twenty years before the outbreak of the First World War: Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Recessional’. Before we offer a summary and analysis of ‘Recessional’, here’s the text of the poem: Recessional
0 Comments
October 26, 2020, 1:51pm Today, the New York Public Library announced the launch of its latest service, Shelf Help, a tool that provides its patrons with personalized book bundles curated by skilled librarians. Shelf Help is the Library’s latest initiative to support New York City during the pandemic. “There is a wonderful moment of serendipity
0 Comments
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the lasting power of Ovid’s great poem Ovid’s wasn’t the first Metamorphoses. Before him, there was Nicander’s Heteroeumena, whose title is usually translated as ‘metamorphoses’, but Nicander’s poem has been lost. It was Ovid’s vast retelling of the great myths of Greek and
0 Comments
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, as the old adage has it. But what have poets down the ages had to say about absences of various kinds, whether the absence of a loved one, or other absence of human company? Below, we introduce ten of the very best poems about absence. 1. William Shakespeare, ‘How
0 Comments