Literature

May 22, 2020, 10:50am If you’d like to spend the long weekend before Raymond Carver’s birthday revisiting some of his short stories, be sure to add this to the list: There’s only one recording of Raymond Carver reading his iconic short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” and it is glorious.

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle goes on his travels to Taormina in Sicily, where D. H. Lawrence lived One tends to associate D. H. Lawrence with his native Nottinghamshire, although Lawrence left his mark on a great number of places. Helen Corke, for instance, even wrote a book with

May 22, 2020, 10:00am On May 23, 2000, fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer tuned in for the finale of season four, expecting another huge production (the last season finale was the two-part “Graduation Day,” after all), though possibly confused as to how the show was going to manage it, considering things with Adam (ugh) and the

‘Now might I do it pat, now he is praying’: so begins one of the numerous soliloquies spoken by Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play. Although it’s not the most famous soliloquy in Hamlet – ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘O that this too too sullied flesh would melt’ are both better-known – ‘Now might

May 21, 2020, 4:01pm Turns out, model and feminist Emily Ratajkowski, known for fighting back against slut-shaming after her droll performance in Robyn Thicke’s Blurred Lines video earned her undeserved criticism (hey, it’s hard out there for a model with giant boobs!), is currently working on an essay collection. That’s right. Selfies can only take

Here are some of the finest poems of remembrance, or about remembrance, which can all be found in the wonderful anthology of remembrance poems, The Nation’s Favourite Poems of Remembrance . Remembrance – whether it’s recalling or remembering a past loved one, or commemorating someone who has passed away – has always been a big

May 21, 2020, 9:30am Bookselling is tricky business: Some months are good, some months are bad, and sometimes, you’re hit with unexpected demand for the novels of an accused murderess and charlatan who became the talk of the town for possibly shooting her husband and holding satanic rituals. There’s a lot going on in this

‘September 1913’ is a poem by W. B. Yeats (1865-1939). It describes Ireland in the month of September 1913, as the title suggests, and sees Yeats lamenting the condition of Ireland at that time. Before we offer an analysis of the poem, here’s a reminder of the text of ‘September 1913’. September 1913 What need

The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically disrupting not only our daily lives but society itself. This show features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the deeper economic, political, and technological consequences of the pandemic. It’s our new daily podcast trying to make longterm sense out of the chaos of today’s global

What is an epigraph? And what is the difference between an epigraph, an epitaph, and an epigram? We’re here to define the epigraph and differentiate it from its near-homophonous neighbours in the dictionary. So, before we launch into a full introduction to the epigraph and its usefulness for writers, let’s distinguish between epigraph, epitaph, and

TODAY: In 1882, Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928, is born. “For such an anti-intellectual, Malaparte is extraordinarily intelligent.” Edmund White on reading Curzio Malaparte, eccentric, writer, liar, fascist. | Lit Hub Great plagues always hit workers the hardest: on Daniel Defoe’s fictional account of the London plague.

‘The More Loving One’ is one of W. H. Auden’s most popular post-1930s poems. At once a celebration of unrequited love and a metaphysical poem about the difficulty of finding ‘love’ and meaning in a secular age, it is a straightforward poem that, like much of Auden’s poetry, conceals more complex meanings beneath the surface.

This is episode nine of The Antibody Reading Series, a weekly reading and Q and A hosted by Brian Gresko. [embedded content] Tonights guests are Laura Van Den Berg, Melissa Febos, and Tracy O’Neill. You can buy their books from The Antibody‘s local indie, Greenlight Bookstore or from Bookshop: Laura Van Den Berg, I Hold a Wolf by

After ‘The Raven’, which is undoubtedly Poe’s most popular poem, ‘Annabel Lee’ is perhaps his next best-known and admired. ‘Annabel Lee’ has been called ‘the simplest and sweetest of [Edgar Allan Poe’s] ballads’ (by Poe’s biographer, George Edward Woodberry), but how ‘simple’ the poem is remains to be seen. Is it a ballad, or narrative

TODAY: In 1930, Lorraine Hansberry born, the first African-American woman to have a play performed on Broadway, is born. Even in retirement, Philip Roth wrote thousands of pages: Benjamin Taylor on stoicism and scandal in the life of a literary icon. | Lit Hub “It is the job of the poet to bring forth the heart’s

The ‘nineteenth-century novel’ covers Jane Austen’s Regency fiction, the comic exuberance of Dickens, the social critiques of Elizabeth Gaskell, the realism of George Eliot, the Gothic inventiveness of late Victorian writers, and the birth of detective fiction. Below, we introduce twelve of the greatest nineteenth-century novels, with some curious facts about them. Jane Austen, Pride

Emma Straub and her husband own Books Are Magic, an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, New York. Four years ago, Judy Blume and her husband, George Cooper, longing for a bookstore in Key West where they live, founded the independent, non-profit Books & Books @ The Studios. Tonight, the two writers turned booksellers sit down to