February 5, 2021, 11:37am There’s so much contemporary fiction released every day, it’s hard to keep track—and it’s hard to know which works will still be remembered in a year and which will slip into obscurity. Luckily, we have George Saunders to guide us. In an interview with Los Angeles Review of Books, Saunders was
Literature
Poets have often written about the days of chivalry, giving us gripping narrative poems about noble knights and brave kings, or romantic lyrics about knights saving damsels … or being brought under seductive women’s spells. Below, we introduce ten of the very best poems about chivalry, knights, and noble deeds from a bygone era. 1.
February 5, 2021, 12:47pm For some reason, it looks like publishers are already eager to sign book deals about the rogue Reddit users who bought up all that GameStop stock. In case you’ve been living under a rock or willfully ignoring the Internet (I applaud you), here’s a quick refresher on the situation, as I
February 5, 2021, 3:02pm Earlier this afternoon EW gave us our first look at one of the most anticipated literary adaptations of the year: HBO’s Made for Love. The TV series adaptation of Tampa-author Alissa Nutting’s deranged and darkly comic 2017 novel stars Cristin Militoni (Palm Springs, Fargo, How I Met Your Mother) as Hazel
‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ is a short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story, narrated as a non-fiction account by the fictional Menard’s equally fictional friend, sees the title character attempting to write the whole of Miguel de Cervantes’ seventeenth-century novel Don Quixote. The story is witty, funny, and absurdist
TODAY: In 1995, poet James Merrill, dies. “Some writers’ work has managed to be politically charged in subtle, strange ways.” Tobias Carroll wonders what makes a political novel last? | Lit Hub Criticism “I have never met a lonelier person than someone suffering with pain.” One physician’s approach to the nebulousness of chronic pain. | Lit Hub Health Anna Malaika Tubbs reflects on the
February 5, 2021, 3:21pm Much has been made of the fact that Samantha will not be appearing in And Just Like That…, the HBO Max reboot of Sex and the City, but luckily, the show will have a Samantha behind the scenes—Samantha Irby. In addition to her TV writing work, Irby has written four books,
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning of Orwell’s famous six-line slogan, ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’ The six-line sentence ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ is one of the two widely known lines from George Orwell’s 1945 novella Animal Farm – the other being ‘all animals
February 5, 2021, 9:30am Because it’s a pandemic, we have a new baby, and we already finished Top Chef, my husband and I have been watching Sex and the City. It’s his first time watching it, but—yes, I am a white woman in my 30s—not mine. I owned all the DVDs in college, before all TV
February 4, 2021, 3:58pm If you don’t hang out in the New York Review of Books Letters section, you may have missed this fairly heated exchange between Rumaan Alam and Ruth Franklin, who reviewed his National Book Award-nominated novel Leave the World Behind in the publication’s last issue. The review in question was mixed (at least according to
The Anglo-American modernist poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was arguably the most influential poet of the twentieth century. With poems like ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, The Waste Land, ‘The Hollow Men’, and Four Quartets, Eliot changed the landscape of poetry forever. T. S. Eliot is also one of the most quotable poets
February 4, 2021, 10:22am For several summers, between college semesters, I was a hostess at an Alice in Wonderland-themed restaurant in Manhattan called Alice’s Teacup. At the time, I was living in Gravesend, Brooklyn, so I would leave my home at six in the morning to make it to the Upper East Side in time
February 3, 2021, 2:04pm 2020 was a hard year for bookstores, for obvious (pandemic) reasons, and the UK-based retailer Waterstones is no exception: last March, it closed its 280 UK branches due to health concerns and the majority of staff were placed on furlough. The UK’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme allowed the government to pay
In some ways Scandinavia’s answer to the tale of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, ‘The Tinder Box’ was one of Hans Christian Andersen’s first fairy tales. ‘The Tinder Box’ contains a number of common fairy-tale tropes: the magic helper with the ability to grant wishes, the ‘rags to riches’ motif, a witch, and a beautiful
February 3, 2021, 10:00am Here’s some wonderful literary news to start your morning (drumroll, please): today, United States Artists (USA) announced its 2021 USA Fellows, which includes eight writers. The award honors the creative accomplishments of its selected fellows by supporting their ongoing artistic and professional development with an unrestricted $50,000 fellowship. According to the
February 2, 2021, 1:38pm Lena Dunham is busy! She’s costarring with Mandy Patinkin, writing moving personal essays for Harper’s, and declaring her sexuality is “the fact that Viggo Mortensen owns a poetry publishing press”—and this spring, she starts shooting in the U.K. for her adaptation of Karen Cushman’s YA classic Catherine, Called Birdy. Dunham is
A Doll’s House is one of the most important plays in all modern drama. Written by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in 1879, the play is well-known for its shocking ending, which attracted both criticism and admiration from audiences when it premiered. Before we offer an analysis of A Doll’s House, it might be worth
February 2, 2021, 9:41am In what is clearly a play for that sweet, sweet newsletter market, Twitter announced last week it has bought Revue “a service that makes it free and easy for anyone to start and publish editorial newsletters,” and will be rolling out the option this week. Even though Substack seems to have