The story of Echo and Narcissus is one of the most famous in all of classical mythology. But really, what we’re dealing with is a case of several different myths being put together. Narcissus has become synonymous with self-love, with the adjective ‘narcissistic’ and the noun ‘narcissism’ being coined to describe the sort of behaviour
Literature
December 16, 2020, 11:11am Deadline announced this morning that Kate Atkinson’s bestselling, award-winning 2014 novel Life After Life is getting the prestige television treatment with the BBC green-lighting a four-part series miniseries adaptation. House Productions have assembled an impressive creative team to bring the project to life, including Brooklyn director John Crowley and playwright/Outlaw King
December 15, 2020, 1:33pm I had a sixth grade math teacher who told us about Frank Zappa’s children, Moon Unit and Dweezil, and used their names in word problems every class. He made towering realistic paper maché dragons. He was muscular and terrifying. This is how I came to learn about Moon Unit Zappa, who
TODAY: In 1913, Muriel Rukeyser, poet and political activist, is born. “Big Manhattan book publishers publish hundreds of authors each year, but in their eyes, only a very few really matter.” Richard Jean So on the inertia of whiteness in postwar print culture. | Lit Hub History The Ultimate Best Books of 2020 List (in which we
TODAY: In 1640, Restoration author Aphra Behn, one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, is baptized. “How could we not understand this story of a baby stripped of its name, discovering its own tenacity, talents and unexpected allies as a version of our own stories?” Eric Gansworth on #NativeTwitter’s
The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood (born 1939) is best-known as a novelist, as the author of books such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. But she began her career as a poet. ‘This Is a Photograph of Me’, today’s poem, is taken from her first collection of poems, The Circle Game, which was
December 14, 2020, 7:57am John le Carré, whose given name was David Cornwell, died on Saturday, December 12, at the age of 89. The cause was pneumonia, his publisher, Penguin Random House, announced in a statement on Sunday. The best-selling author and onetime actual British spy is widely known as perhaps the world’s greatest spy
December 11, 2020, 12:17pm Disaffected thinkers smoking cigarettes listening to jazz records and gazing from your unadorned apartments onto sprawling urban landscapes, rejoice! Haruki Murakami is hosting a New Year’s Eve radio special live from a studio in Kyoto. The special will be aired on Tokyo FM’s nationwide network of 38 broadcasting stations, from 11
December 11, 2020, 12:21pm Colorado bookstore chain Tattered Cover has been acquired by an investment group that includes Kwame Spearman, who is Black, an arrangement that has led to more than a few stories referring to Tattered Cover as “the largest Black-owned bookstore in America.” This is not sitting well with Black booksellers across the
December 11, 2020, 12:41pm Some good holiday news: Costa Coffee and literacy charity The Reading Agency have teamed up to donate 100,000 books to groups hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic. In total, 50,000 book-and-coffee care packages will be donated to food banks, community hubs, hospitals and care facilities across the U.K—all prior to December
TODAY: In 1899, Herbert Putnam is appointed as the eighth Librarian of Congress. “He believed he’d learn much more by traveling with Nunamiut hunters first, questioning them about wolf behavior in general.” Barry Lopez on the wildlife biologist who changed his life as an environmentalist. | Lit Hub Nature “I personally know the author of this story
December 11, 2020, 1:52pm For Chanukah this year, we’re looking back—not back to the Maccabees, but still pretty far back. Today we’re “shining a light” (ha ha ha) on some medieval manuscripts that deal with Chanukah. Enjoy! The David Bar Pesah Mahzor, 14th-century Germany. This 1156-page two-volume text is named after its scribe and decorator,
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle examines the supposed literary origins of a popular girls’ name Where does the name Imogen come from? Some name origins are more interesting than others. And the origin of the girls’ name Imogen is more interesting than most. Imogen is a character in Cymbeline,
TODAY: In 1937, Jim Harrison is born. “He believed he’d learn much more by traveling with Nunamiut hunters first, questioning them about wolf behavior in general.” Barry Lopez on the wildlife biologist who changed his life as an environmentalist. | Lit Hub Nature “Black Futures started as all great contemporary love stories do—on an app!” Kimberly Drew
December 10, 2020, 1:18pm For a while, Melania Trump has teased that she might write a book after the Trump family exits the White House. I, like many, had mixed feelings. On one hand, it’d be interesting to see the Trump administration from the point of the view of the famously sullen First Lady; but
December 10, 2020, 9:46am Earlier this year, Lisa Lucas announced that she would be stepping down as executive director of the National Book Foundation to become Senior Vice President & Publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books. This morning, the National Book Foundation announced that Lucas will be joining the Foundation’s Board of Directors, and that
December 9, 2020, 4:07pm The Albertine Prize, an annual reader’s-choice award, recognizes and honors US-based readers’ favorite work of contemporary French fiction that was translated and published in the US during the previous year. The Award comes with a $10,000 cash prize, split between the author and translator. This year, the winner is Zahia Rahmani, for
The Sirens were half-woman and half-bird, although they are sometimes wrongly associated with mermaids (so half-woman and half-fish), probably because of their proximity to the sea (although they were strictly land-based, they tended to hang about down on the shore so they could attract the passing boats full of hapless sailors). They were enchantresses whose