May 7, 2021, 12:47pm The 215 Literary Arts Festival—in partnership with Rutgers University Camden, The Stables, and Laternfish Press—is bringing together a band of writers, editors, musicians, and DJ librarians to celebrate the vibrant literary arts scene in the Philadelphia area, from May 10th to 15th. The Festival, founded in 2001, has hosted an array
Literature
‘The Lottery in Babylon’, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges first published in 1941, is among his most ‘Kafkaesque’ tales, bearing the influence of the Czech writer in a number of its key aspects. At the time, Borges was working a rather unfulfilling library job refilling the bookshelves, and ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ reflects
TODAY: In 2012, Maurice Sendak dies. Cross your legs, stretch your hymen: Danielle Dreilinger on the college courses that sought to curb divorce. | Lit Hub “It changes it from an entertaining satire about grubbing minor poets into a truly great story about thwarted friendship and human loneliness.” How a Robert Bolaño story influenced Chris Powers’
May 7, 2021, 4:33pm Let me tell you about a little film I watched the other night: a 2009 flick lost to the annals of history called Love Happens. It stars Jennifer Aniston as an unlucky-in-love florist. Judy Greer reprises her lifetime role as the tough-love best friend, but this time she is also an
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the meaning of a strange Shakespearean quotation Let’s start with two correctives to common misconceptions about Romeo and Juliet. First of all, when Juliet asks her star-cross’d lover, ‘O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ she isn’t, of course, asking him where he
TODAY: In 1812, Robert Browning is born. Phoebe S.K. Young considers how companies brand The Great Outdoors (i.e. aggressively), and COVID’s impact on our concept of camping. | Lit Hub Maggie Shipstead takes the Lit Hub Questionnaire, and confesses that she still hasn’t read War and Peace (no judgment). | Lit Hub Questionnaires “He had
May 6, 2021, 12:50pm Stacey Abrams has had a busy year: on May 11th, Doubleday will publish her political thriller While Justice Sleeps, and Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Random House, has just picked up her three out-of-print romances for re-publication. (And that’s not to mention Abrams’s work as a politician and voting rights advocate.)
‘Decline of the English Murder’ is one of a number of famous essays by George Orwell which appeared in something of an annus mirabilis for him, 1946, just after the end of the Second World War. But ‘Decline of the English Murder’ is a particularly intriguing case because it sees Orwell turning from two of
Writers love boxing. The list of authors fascinated with pugilism includes Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Lord Byron, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer. Many liken the process of writing a book to a boxer’s fight. The fight itself is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak; maybe only 10
The story of Hero and Leander is not the most famous tragic love story from classical mythology, but after all, there are quite a few other such stories to choose from. When it comes to classical myth, we might turn to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, Dido and Aeneas, or Theseus and Ariadne, or
May 5, 2021, 1:17pm The Clio Awards, which recognize innovation in advertising, design and communication, have just awarded their grand prize to “The Uncensored Library,” a library that houses books and articles censored in their country of origin—a library built entirely in Minecraft. Reporters Without Borders, aided by creative agency DDB Germany and production company
TODAY: In 1927, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is published. Annette Gordon-Reed on Juneteenth, an oral history of ACT UP, and a new Bob Dylan biography all feature among May’s new and noteworthy nonfiction. | Lit Hub Reading Lists David Coggins wants you to experience the poetry of fly-fishing. | Lit Hub Sports “My main problem
Great Expectations is one of Dickens’s most popular novels: perhaps only Oliver Twist and David Copperfield are equally well-known and well-regarded among his full-length novels (A Christmas Carol, technically a novella, is surely his most famous book of all). Not bad for a novel which Dickens only started writing because another novel, by his now-forgotten
May 4, 2021, 3:51pm St. Vincent, aka Annie Clark, is gearing up for a new album release in ten days, which—in classic St. Vincent form—means a completely reinvented sonic and visual palette via teasers and singles. Clark’s new album, Daddy’s Home, wears its ‘70’s influences on its sleeve, but oldies rock isn’t all Clark’s been
TODAY: In 1916, journalist and urbanist Jane Jacobs is born. It’s a war, a war of punctuation marks; these famous writers are—perhaps unsurprisingly—willing to die on these comma-ridden hills! | Lit Hub Happy New Books Tuesday, from these 23 releases that are begging to be read by you. | The Hub “Gathering observations and making
‘And what’s he then that says I play the villain?’ is one of a number of major soliloquies spoken by Iago, the villain and chief architect of William Shakespeare’s Othello. We’ve previously analysed Othello here, but now let’s take a closer look at the speech which begins ‘And what’s he then that says I play
May 3, 2021, 1:31pm Kundiman has just announced this year’s cohort of fellows for the Kundiman Mentorship Lab, an annual program supporting nine NYC-based emerging Asian American artists per year. Mentorship Fellows will receive a $1000 stipend, craft classes and genre workshops, individual mentorships, and a culminating public reading in 2022. This year’s fellows will
TODAY: In 1937, Brazilian author Nélida Piñon is born. Against leaving your options open: Pete Davis makes a counterargument in an era of infinite browsing. | Lit Hub “The novel offers a meticulous dissection of a German male psyche at a time when German masculinity was being mobilized in a vast genocidal enterprise.” Clayton Wickham