Although perhaps the most famous symbolic quality associated with the colour white is ‘purity’, this summary doesn’t take into account the complexity and ambiguity of colour symbolism when it comes to the colour white: a colour which is at once all colours and no colour. In this post, we’re going to analyse the symbolism and
Literature
Timur likes going to the cinema to see double bills of Turkish or foreign films; a romance and an adventure film, a drama and a western—it almost doesn’t matter what they show. It’s a treat, but not as much as going to Istanbul; drinking, listening to the beautiful singers and cheering on the footballers. The
Melissa Febos in her previous works has investigated herself with smart, hawk-eyed precision and dazzling prose. In Girlhood, Febos’s new essay collection, she turns her unflinching eye to the experience of coming of age in a female body. Pulling from her own memories and reflections, interspersed with those of women she interviewed, Febos reveals how
‘A Day’s Wait’ is one of Ernest Hemingway’s shortest short stories, running to just a few pages. It was published in 1927 in his collection The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. In just a few pages, ‘A Day’s Wait’ covers a number of key features of Hemingway’s work as a whole, and so despite
Despite my inclination for critical detachment, I admit there are some books I can’t help but take personally. As a person who stutters, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is one of those books. I first read the Pulitzer-winning novel my senior year of college, during which I wrote a thesis about characters who stutter. I’d compiled
During the first month of the pandemic I was afraid to write to my grandpa. I imagined the virus, bright pink but invisible, smearing the paper and the envelope and the mail carrier’s glove, and so on, all the way to my grandpa’s hand. In April I began sending him a weekly letter at the nursing home where
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers a famous and much-misunderstood quotation from Shakespeare ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ These words are among the most-quoted in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, and they’re up against a whole host of other
TODAY: In 1947, Camille Paglia is born. “Our letters are a closeness we can keep.” Jackie Polzin on writing letters to her grandfather during COVID, and the joys of slow correspondence. | Lit Hub On American Pastoral’s Merry Levov, American literary fiction’s peerless female stutterer, and what we lose by singular representation. | Lit Hub
April 1, 2021, 1:35pm On April 23, “one of the most important collections of illuminated manuscripts and early prints to have appeared at auction” will go on sale at Christie’s. This collection, the private collection of late philanthropists and collectors Elaine and Alexandre P. Rosenberg, is expected to fetch at least £8 million. Notable among
Washington Irving (1783-1859) is often known as ‘the father of American literature’. Named in honour of the (future) first US President, Irving has had a huge influence on American writers for two centuries, and has also been responsible (indirectly) for the name of the knickerbocker glory dessert and, even, the word ‘knickers’ (both words come
April 1, 2021, 9:00am Depending on who you ask, Substack is either a haven for writers who have flounced away from their journalism jobs claiming that Cancel Culture forced them out, or a platform that allows writers to actually (maybe) pay their bills without relying on a media company owned by a fickle tech billionaire
March 31, 2021, 3:25pm The year from hell has turned out to be a hell of a year for Eisner Award-winning cartoonist and New Yorker illustrator Adrian Tomine. First, his graphic memoir, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, got a pretty rapturous critical reception upon its release back in June. Then, three months later, it
Midas is known for two things: being given the ears of an ass, and turning everything he touched into gold. The latter of these was his reward from Dionysus, although he soon discovered that his gift was a bane rather than a blessing, and that he couldn’t even do simple things like take a drink
TODAY: In 1855, Charlotte Brontë, English novelist and poet and the eldest of the three Brontë sisters whose novels became classics of English literature, dies. “What would it mean to make caring for others into an explicitly public priority?” Reading Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through amid a national mental health crisis. | Public
March 30, 2021, 1:31pm This past Thursday, Seattle law firm Hagens Berman filed a proposed class-action lawsuit on behalf of Illinois bookseller Bookends & Beginnings, alleging Amazon colluded to fix prices on print books. The suit claims that Amazon’s restrictive contracts with the “Big Five” publishers have made it impossible for book retailers to beat
The Great Gatsby is the quintessential Jazz Age novel, capturing a mood and a moment in American history in the 1920s, after the end of the First World War. Rather surprisingly, The Great Gatsby sold no more than 25,000 copies in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lifetime. It has now sold over 25 million copies. How did this
March 30, 2021, 10:00am Richard Garriott has had the kind of career that kids aim for before the world tells them it’s unrealistic. In addition to his work as a video game creator, Garriott is a lifelong explorer (the new president-elect of the Explorer’s Club, in fact) who has traversed both poles of the earth,
March 29, 2021, 2:51pm I am sorry to report that there is a new controversial TikTok making its way around the literary internet. The reddest flags. https://t.co/nYn9bpzq7P pic.twitter.com/vt8TJkaoFl — Joanna Robinson 🇺🇸✌️🏳️🌈 (@jowrotethis) March 28, 2021 There’s a lot to unpack here—the song, the dreamcatcher, the fact this post came from a “Seamus Heaney stan