Antigone is, after Oedipus Rex, the most famous of Sophocles’ plays to survive. Written over 2,400 years ago, Antigone is one of the finest examples of Greek tragedy: the play explores its central moral issue through its two main characters, Antigone and Creon, and remains as relevant now as it was when Sophocles first wrote
Literature
March 16, 2021, 2:22pm Since its publication in 2015, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer has become one of the most widely celebrated debuts in recent memory—winning the Pulitzer Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the Edgar Award for Best First Novel (among others),
TODAY: In 1883, Australian poet, essayist, novelist and painter Ethel Anderson is born. “I found myself straddling two very different identities, as a committed nun and as a woman experiencing myself as a sexual person for the first time.” Patricia M. Dwyer on the life-changing, “in-between” poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. | Lit Hub Criticism Paul
Dated ‘Missolonghi, Jan. 22, 1824’, ‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’ is a poem Lord Byron wrote on his 36th birthday, less than three months before he died. Byron was at Missolonghi, in Greece, fighting with the Greeks in their war for independence. It’s one of Byron’s most meditative and personal poems, and
March 15, 2021, 4:50pm Sic semper tyrannis—a quote attributed to Brutus, one of Julius Caesar’s assassins; the motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia; and the cry of John Wilkes Booth right after he shot Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre in 1865. Although one might imagine John Wilkes Booth was referring to the commonwealth’s motto, it’s
TODAY: In 1959, Nigerian writer Ben Okri is born. “We downplay issues with food as just par for the course, the cost of doing business in girlhood.” Emily Layden on eating disorders and the secret lives of teenage girls. | Lit Hub If we can’t live in the utopia of a world without emails, Cal Newport suggests
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the rainbow has often been used in literature, religion, and art to symbolise the bridge between the land and the sky, the earth and heavens. But rainbow symbolism is also wide-ranging in different cultures, so it’s worth exploring the different meanings of the rainbow throughout the centuries, and in different religions and works
March 12, 2021, 11:23am Art by Xavier Marabout When I was a kid, I loved the Tintin books. I had every one (except the ones that Hergé pulled from print due to their racist undertones), and a poster, and a little stuffed Snowy to boot. I probably shouldn’t admit this on the internet, but at
March 12, 2021, 12:00pm Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (not to be confused with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) is, to my mind, the single greatest horror story ever written, as well as the single greatest work of art ever created by a teenager (with apologies to Messrs. Mozart, Picasso, and Wonder). Shelley’s Gothic fireside-yarn-turned-novel is the story of
‘The Country of the Blind’ is one of H. G. Wells’s finest short stories, published in The Strand magazine in 1904 and then collected in Wells’s short-story collection The Country of the Blind and Other Stories in 1911. It belongs to his early phase, when – during the ten or so years following the publication
TODAY: In 1892, American writer and journalist Janet Flanner, who served as the Paris correspondent of The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until 1975, is born. Nineteen ways of looking at Marilynn Robinson: Kevin Brockmeier on the literary prowess (and workshop advice) of an American icon. | Lit Hub “With each new agent, each foray into
March 12, 2021, 12:18pm Shed Simove insists that he has bad timing. For eighteen years, the London-based writer has been working on his manuscript about a pandemic—only to attempt to publish it during a pandemic. Amid the throes of COVID-19 is perhaps not the best moment for Simove’s novel Alpha Male, a story about a
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of a famous phrase associated with Oscar Wilde Which writer gave us the expression ‘the love that dare not speak its name’? Oscar Wilde? He gave us many other famous quotations, of course; but although ‘the love that dare not speak
March 12, 2021, 2:04pm Recently, I’ve started watching America’s Next Top Model, which is a show about discomfort; a show where contestants are forced to hold snakes and spiders and withstand darkness and rain and hang upside down like bats and leap from skyscrapers. The central question of America’s Next Top Model is: Are you
TODAY: In 1898, Brazillian writer Ribeiro Couto is born. “What does it mean to be both female and empowered in a society that sees femininity as opposed to power?” Sarah Menkedick on the liberation of early airline stewardesses. | Lit Hub Jeff Martin recounts turning on a dime to host Magic City Book’s very first
Iambic pentameter has been around in English verse for … well, almost as long as English verse itself has been around. Certainly, since the late fourteenth century when Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400), arguably England’s first great poet, used iambic pentameter in his work, this five-foot and ten-syllable verse line has proved indispensable to pretty much
March 11, 2021, 2:42pm The UK arm of Bookshop.org, the online retailer that partners with indie bookstores, has a new initiative on the way: it’s launching a series of online events for its customers as well as customers of unaffiliated indies. For the first event on March 23rd, Bookshop is partnering with Faber to host
TODAY: In 1744, English auction house Sotheby’s holds its first ever auction, the dispersal of “several Hundred scarce and valuable Books in all branches of Polite Literature” from the library of Sir John Stanley, which fetched a grand total of £826. “As to whether a male writer might have enjoyed more recognition for the same