‘The Student’ is a short story by Anton Chekhov, published in 1894. It’s one of his shortest stories, running to just a few pages, and – in keeping with many of Chekhov’s best short stories, very little happens in the way of plot. Yet Chekhov himself considered ‘The Student’ his favourite of all his short
Literature
TODAY: In 1925, The Great Gatsby is published. “I imagine you might still remember his name, since the 1978 season was all his.” Haruki Murakami on the magical year that Dave Hilton debuted for the Yakult Swallows. | Lit Hub Sports “I don’t think this discussion about grabbing the reader is really about attention spans. I think it’s about art,
April 9, 2021, 12:58pm Today, April 9th, marks the fifty-eight publication anniversary of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Perhaps the most beloved children’s book of the latter half of the 20th century, Sendak’s gorgeously-illustrated tale of a young boy in a wolf suit who, upon being sent to bed with no supper, is transported
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews James Raven’s erudite and informative history of that ubiquitous invention, the book In the Exeter Book, one of the jewels in the crown of Anglo-Saxon literature, a riddle appears which begins: Some enemy deprived me of my lifeAnd took away my worldly strength,
April 9, 2021, 1:01pm Tomorrow, we celebrate the 174th birthday of Joseph Pulitzer, now most well-known for establishing the Pulitzer Prizes with his endowment to Columbia University. But in his time, he was an elected Democratic congressman from New York fighting corruption, and the publisher of the New York World newspaper—a job so stressful he
April 8, 2021, 1:20pm If you’re a Lord of the Rings fan and have three minutes to spare, please spare them to contribute to an oral history of Tolkien fandom! Building on Marquette University’s extensive J.R.R. Tolkien Collection, which includes original Tolkien documents and manuscripts, Marquette’s Department of Special Collections has created the J.R.R. Tolkien
Poetry and magic share a curious history, since shamans and priests of ancient times would chant verses and incantations as part of their rituals designed to heal the sick, influence the weather, or appeal to the gods. So we might even say there is something peculiarly ‘magical’ about poetry. Below, we introduce ten of the
April 8, 2021, 10:41am Today, the Center for Fiction announced that after an extensive national search, Traci Lester has been named as the organization’s next Executive Director. Lester comes to the Center for Fiction from the National Dance Institute, where she served as Executive Director from 2016 until this March; Lester also spent over a
April 7, 2021, 2:31pm It’s William Wordsworth’s 251st birthday today, and we’re celebrating by taking a look at people who didn’t like him. (Why not?) For someone who had such wonder and amazement in his heart for, say, a mountain, Wordsworth was not a warm guy; he said of himself that as a child he
To be ‘between Scylla and Charybdis’ is, if you will, to be caught between a rock and a hard place – in other words, between two equally unappealing dangers or prospects. But how did the phrase come into being? What are its origins, and who on earth were Scylla and Charybdis? In the latest in
April 7, 2021, 12:35pm This morning, the brilliant Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai, Lightning Rods, and Some Trick, posted a devastating Twitter thread to which many, many people in America can, unfortunately, probably relate: DeWitt had a medical emergency in December which resulted in a bill of over $6,000. DeWitt went on to say
April 6, 2021, 5:21pm I’ve always been a fan of Tom Waits. But I was a huge fan of Tom Waits in my late teens and early twenties when his whiskey-soaked romanticism, all burnt-out and busted, was soundtrack to my fantasies of life on the down-and-out. And how did I arrive at these fantasies? By
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published in 1950, was the first of the seven Chronicles of Narnia to be published. The book became an almost instant classic, although its author, C. S. Lewis, reportedly destroyed the first draft after he received harsh criticism on it from his friends and fellow fantasy writers, including
April 6, 2021, 11:47am Craving some new Lord of the Rings-related media? While you wait for the Amazon Prime series, have a laugh and watch this 30-year-old television adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring, courtesy of Russian channel 5TV. The 1991 film aired once, never to be seen again—until now. Very much a product of
April 5, 2021, 1:32pm There’s much to celebrate at the moment: it’s spring, vaccinations are becoming widely available, Cadbury Cream Eggs are steeply discounted at Walgreen’s… But in case you’re still looking for a way to quiet your racing mind, may I recommend Oral Florist? Created (or “arranged”) by writer and translator Rita Bullwinkel and
‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’ is the title usually given to T. S. Eliot’s review of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Eliot’s short review was published in The Dial magazine in 1923, and can be read here; below, we offer a few words of analysis of this influential essay by one major modernist writer, about the work of
April 5, 2021, 10:53am N+1 has announced a new fiction prize in honor of n+1 contributor and brilliant short story writer Anthony Veasna So, who died in 2020. The newly established Anthony Veasna So Fiction Prize is an annual $5,000 award granted to a fiction writer whose work has appeared in n+1 in print or
In this episode, Andrew is joined by Tobey Pearl, the author of Terror to the Wicked, to discuss the violence, war, and oppression that shaped life in early America, as well as to share the story and impact of the first murder trial in the nation’s history. From the episode: Tobey Pearl: I certainly am