Literature

One of the most important and influential American writers of the nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) was a descendant of John Hathorne, one of the judges at the Salem witch trials of 1692. And New England Puritanism is very much at the heart of his work. He’s regarded by many critics as the first major

April 22, 2021, 2:16pm If you’ve been seeing headlines this week that say things like “Jane Austen canceled for drinking tea” and “Woke Madness! Jane Austen under historical interrogation,” and are a.) worried or b.) simply confused, let me clear things up: Jane Austen has not been canceled for drinking tea, and there is no

The following is excerpted from Fiona Mozley’s latest novel, Hot Stew, about wealth and inheritance, gender and power, and the things women must do to survive in an unjust world. Mozley was born in East London and raised in York, in the North of England. She studied history at Cambridge and then lived in Buenos

Of all of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales for children, ‘The Selfish Giant’ has the strongest Christian symbolism and is clearly meant to be read and analysed as an allegory for Christian love. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the story and its meaning and imagery. You can read ‘The Selfish Giant’ here

In The Phantom Tollbooth, Milo—the child-hero driving through a world of word and number play—accidentally enters a low, dull place. The world loses all its color, everything becoming “grayer and monotonous.” He feels drowsy, his car won’t move, and finally he comes to a dead stop. He has strayed into this land of stasis by

There is a famous anecdote about Lewis Carroll and Queen Victoria: Victoria enjoyed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) so much that she requested a first edition of Carroll’s next book. Carroll duly sent her a copy of the next book he published – a mathematical work with the exciting title An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.

For some, home is the house they grew up in. For others, it’s a country or a nation. Some find it in family, or in the arms of a lover, while others believe it’s where we go when we die. Some say home is the “pale blue dot” that is our planet, and still others

‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’ is a poem by Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-84), who was the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in 1773 when she was probably still in her early twenties. Because Wheatley stands at the beginning of a long

April 19, 2021, 2:34pm Sometimes the Internet is . . . good? Case in point: today, the algorithm directed me to this speedy visual recap of Pride and Prejudice, explained in the (cherry-picked) dulcet tones of John Mulaney. And you thought there was nothing left to mash up with Jane Austen! (Reader, there’s always something

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks

Apples are a common fruit, and so it’s little surprise that apples have come to have powerful and distinctive symbolic properties in works of literature, religion, and myth over the centuries. But there are a number of misconceptions and wrong assumptions about apple-symbolism. How can we tell the bad apples from the rest? In this

April 16, 2021, 11:48am Beware—there’s a new wave of COVID! It’s novels. The latest writer to be infected is Super Sad True Love Story author Gary Shteyngart, whose newly announced novel Our Country Friends follows the shifting relationships of a group of friends at a country house in upstate New York as they hide from

April 16, 2021, 12:55pm Tomorrow marks the 124th birthday of Thornton Wilder—and we’re celebrating by watching the opening monologue of the formally innovative Our Town delivered by another theatrical innovator, Spalding Gray. Spalding Gray as the Narrator in Our Town seems like perfect casting: Gray was known for his solo monologues, like Swimming to Cambodia,

‘The Lost Decade’ is one of the shortest works by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), the American author best-known for The Great Gatsby. Published in Esquire magazine in December 1939, just one year before Fitzgerald died, ‘The Lost Decade’ is one of his most powerful short stories to deal with the effects of drink and the

TODAY: In 1897, Thornton Wilder, the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and drama, is born.  JoAnne Tompkins considers the inner life of an aging shelter dog. | Lit Hub “Although it isn’t infectious like a virus, depression thrives on proximity, traveling down familial attachments, especially from mother to child.” Alex Riley on

April 16, 2021, 12:16pm When I was a kid, there was nothing I loved more than a fresh new sketchbook (so much so that I tended to abandon them after filling out four or five drawings of people standing on tippie toes because I never did figure out how to draw feet standing normally). But

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Kristin Swenson’s fascinating and accessible introduction to the Bible In the earliest New Testament writings, the mother of Jesus doesn’t even have a name. Paul says simply that Jesus was born from a woman, and there are very few references to the Virgin

April 16, 2021, 1:28pm Sleuths rejoice! After twenty years, the Oxfordshire house where Dame Agatha Christie wrote many of her most famous crime novels is on the market once more with a guide price of over £2.75 million. It’s got to be said that this is a great day for sleuths. Christie moved into Winterbrook