June 1, 2021, 4:47pm Dear reader, I hope this list finds you well-rested and ready to read. We’ve got an almost intimidating amount of exciting new titles coming our way today! * Kristen Arnett, With Teeth(Riverhead) “[A] hilarious and astute dive into the not-so-fun parts of parenthood. Arnett shows her range with laugh-out-loud scenes and
Literature
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) is one of the most important writers in American literature. He has been credited with writing the ‘great American novel’ and his stories and novels have come to epitomise the Jazz Age: the age of cocktails, parties, and excess in 1920s America. But there’s much more to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work
Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan has been called “one of our greatest living novelists” (Washington Post). His seven novels have received numerous awards, including the 2014 Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and the Commonwealth Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish. He also has been an outspoken activist on the environment with
TODAY: In 2014, Maya Angelou dies at 86. “Beach books” contain multitudes… Here are the 75 nonfiction books you should read this summer, according to us. | Lit Hub “To many writers, Ramallah is an ideal, a dream, a promise.” Maya Abu Al-Hayat on the thriving artistic life of the Palestinian city. | Lit Hub INTERVIEW WITH
The same play which gave us one of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches – the ‘seven ages of man’ speech beginning ‘All the world’s a stage’ – also gave us one of his most famous songs: ‘Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind’. Indeed, not only do both of these famous passages appear in the same play, As
May 28, 2021, 9:18am In the opening pages of José Saramago’s 1995 novel Blindness, a man is driving home when he suddenly goes blind. The blindness has no apparent cause, physical or otherwise—but it quickly reveals itself to be contagious: soon everyone who was in the doctor’s office the man visits is blind, and then
May 28, 2021, 10:00am It’s officially Memorial Day weekend, AKA the unofficial start of summer, and I am feeling very much like I should be sipping a fruity drink on a hot porch somewhere, listening to sunny earworms and tanning my feet, as somewhere in the distance, a dog barks neon light flashes GOOD VIBES
The poster-boy of existentialism, Sisyphus has become associated with laborious and pointless tasks, because he was condemned to roll a boulder up a hill, only for the boulder to roll back down to the bottom just as he was about to complete the task. He was thus doomed to repeat this action forever. However, there’s
May 28, 2021, 11:52am Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, Joan Silber’s Secrets of Happiness, Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Month. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.” Fiction 1. Second Place by Rachel
TODAY: In 1851, Sojourner Truth delivers the “Ain’t I A Woman” speech at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron. “We tend to believe that invertebrates lack any mental life whatsoever, but science has been exposing the frailty of such a belief.” Jonathan Balcombe on the secret lives of flies. | Lit Hub Science “We can no longer act
‘The Dead’ is the most critically acclaimed and widely studied story in James Joyce’s Dubliners, a collection of 15 short stories written by James Joyce and published in 1914. As we’ve remarked before, Dubliners is now regarded as one of the landmark texts of modernist literature, but initially sales were poor, with just 379 copies
May 28, 2021, 12:07pm Another tally mark on the Something Nice Is Actually Fake cave wall of the Internet: the heartwarming quote from beloved children’s author and illustrator Eric Carle making the rounds online yesterday is actually a six-year-old April Fool’s joke. And yet it managed to be shared by tens of thousands of Carle
May 28, 2021, 1:24pm Here’s an incredible archival project you might not know about: Reveal Digital is partnering with academic and public libraries to fund an expanding, open access collection of American prison newspapers. “American Prison Newspapers, 1800-2020: Voices From The Inside” is collecting and digitizing over 350 prison publications, starting with two of the
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning and history of a famous phrase We’ve doubtless all heard the phrase ‘Achilles heel’. It is used to refer to an otherwise strong person’s one weak spot, and references a story from Greek mythology concerning the great hero Achilles. Here’s a
May 27, 2021, 11:39am Yes, it might seem a little late in May for an Asian Pacific American Heritage Month reading list. This is partially due to my extreme procrastination, partially due to the fact that I kept wanting to add more names, but mostly because I think everyone should be reading these books all
May 27, 2021, 12:00pm A volume of 31 handwritten poems by Emily Brontë, with pencil corrections by Charlotte Brontë, is going up for auction at Sotheby’s along with other rare Brontë-affiliated manuscripts and other works collected by Alfred and William Law. Sotheby’s has valued the manuscript between £800,000 and £1,200,000. The handwritten manuscript played a
May 27, 2021, 2:09pm Yesterday, the National Coalition Against Censorship released a letter to the Board of Education of Columbus County Schools in Whiteville, North Carolina, condemning their position on restricting use of Laurin Mayeno’s children’s book One of a Kind, Like Me / Único Como Yo in classrooms. According to the Columbus News Reporter,
As Hugh Leonard once said, ‘Hamlet is a terrific play, but there are way too many quotations in it.’ So many lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet have become famous to people who have never read, studied, or watched the play. As a result, these quotations are often misquoted, taken out of context, or misinterpreted. So let’s