Literature

‘Shooting an Elephant’ is a 1936 essay by George Orwell (1903-50), about his time as a young policeman in Burma, which was then part of the British empire. The essay explores an apparent paradox about the behaviour of Europeans, who supposedly have the power over their colonial subjects. Before we offer an analysis of Orwell’s

March 29, 2021, 10:25am Only three months after the high-profile merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, The New York Times reported earlier this morning that HarperCollins, one of publishing’s “Big Five,” will acquire Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books and Media—Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s trade publishing division—for $349 million. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s revenue fell over

March 26, 2021, 2:40pm Two franchises alike in type of work,One Marvel, one that puts out parodies,That’s called Quirk Books, the main word being “quirk”;They’re behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies— From forth their fertile loins comes a collabWhich any real specific purpose shirks;IPs embracing named this money grabWilliam Shakespeare’s Avengers: The Complete Works. Exit

Perhaps the two most important and prominent qualities which dogs have symbolised in literature and myth down the ages are vigilance and loyalty. However, there are also some curious and lesser-known aspects of dog-symbolism which are worth probing; we’ll get to these in time. As the vast and informative The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols (Penguin

Plucky heroines abound across Anglo and American children’s literature, yet their own struggles with gendered strictures and the trajectories of their comings-of-age often present conflicting narratives. Perhaps one of the most uncompromising—and uncompromised—children’s heroines from the twentieth century is Pippi Longstocking, literary creation of Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren. Disgusted by the ways in which adults

Dubliners is 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 being sold in the first year (famously, 120 of these were bought by

TODAY: In 1931, the English writer Arnold Bennett dies of typhoid in London, shortly after a visit to Paris, where he drank local water in an attempt to prove it was safe. “People who buy books! What a special category of souls.” Nicola DeRobertis-Theye on coming of age in a struggling Berkeley Bookstore. | Lit Hub

March 27, 2021, 9:47am Legend of children’s literature Beverly Cleary died on March 25th in Carmel, California, HarperCollins announced on Friday. She was 104. Since publishing Henry Huggins in 1950, when she was a librarian, Cleary has sold 85 million copies of her books, which have been translated into 29 different languages. She won the National Book

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores perhaps the most enigmatic inscription in a book of poems ‘To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets’: so begins perhaps the most puzzling poetic dedication in all of English literature. Here it is, in full: TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.THESE.INSVING.SONNETS.MR.W.H.ALL.HAPPINESSE.AND.THAT.ETERNITIE.PROMISED.BY.OVR.EVER-LIVING.POET.WISHETH.THE.WELL-WISHING.ADVENTVRER.IN.SETTING.FORTH.T.T. This is the dedication to the

March 26, 2021, 3:40pm Dear reader, I know what you are thinking! Isn’t Women’s History Month basically over? Isn’t it a little too late for this listicle? No! To put this reading list before you at the very beginning of the month would be to subscribe to the idea that March is the set time

March 26, 2021, 10:00am I write prose, not poetry, but the most helpful piece of advice I’ve ever read was written by a poet: Robert Frost, who was born 147 years ago today. In the second, expanded edition of his Collected Poems, published in 1939, Frost included an introductory essay called “The Figure a Poem Makes.”

When compared with the sonnet, ballad, or even the villanelle, the pantoum verse form could hardly be called ‘popular’, and examples of pantoums in English literature are not exactly plentiful. Nonetheless, there are some fine instances of the pantoum – a distinctive and strict form which has been summarised here – and below we gather

March 25, 2021, 8:30pm This evening, during a virtual event, the National Book Critics Circle announced the recipients of its 2020 book awards, spread across six categories, and also awarded the previously announced Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award (to the Feminist Press) and Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing (to Jo Livingstone). The winners

TODAY: In 1939, Toni Cade Bambara is born. “I often tell the joke that I jam my poems into ATMs just to see what happens.” Roy Yamaguchi talks to Peter Mishler about finding—and making—a life as a poet. | Lit Hub Poetry Mia Bay maps the unpredictable and dangerous history of segregated travel, from Jim

The Biblical account of the Flood, in the Book of Genesis, is similar to the older Babylonian accounts of a Great Flood. These texts, written much earlier, include the Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem which predates Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and the earliest Old Testament accounts, by more than a millennium. It’s possible, therefore,

March 24, 2021, 3:47pm Plenty of writers have adapted, or had a hand in adapting, their own novels for the screen. Gillian Flynn did it with Gone Girl. John Irving did it with The Cider House Rules. Nick Horby did it with Fever Pitch. William Peter Blatty did it with The Exorcist. William Goldman did it with

March 24, 2021, 7:00am Today, the Columbia School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard announced the 4 winners and 2 finalists of the 2021 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards, which honors the best American nonfiction writing of the previous year. The Prizes, established in 1998, consist of the J. Anthony Lukas

Gulliver’s Travels, first published in 1726 and written by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), has been called one of the first novels in English, one of the greatest satires in all of literature, and even a children’s classic (though any edition for younger readers is usually quite heavily abridged). How should we respond to this wonderfully inventive