In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning and origin of a well-known proverb ‘Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’ It’s become a proverb, and proverbs are, usually, authorless. Actually, that’s not really true. Although ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ or
Literature
January 15, 2021, 12:54pm Earlier this year, we learned of the founding of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which is the first English-language literary award to celebrate excellence in fiction by women writers in the United States and Canada. And today, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction announced that it has received a $250,000
TODAY: In 1933, Ernest J. Gaines is born. What if the stories we tell in order to live happen to be conspiracy theories? William J. Bernstein on the evolutionary origins of collective delusion. | Lit Hub History Refugee, resident, dissident: Yiyun Li introduces Bette Howland’s 1974 memoir about her stay in a Chicago psychiatric hospital. |
January 14, 2021, 2:34pm Less than a month on from the movie poster controversy (Cherrk!) that rocked the internet to its very core, the first trailer for Cherry—the Tom Holland-starring film adaptation of Nico Walker’s 2018 semi-autobiographical debut novel about an Iraq War veteran turned drug addict turned bank robber—has dropped. Directed by the Russo Brothers,
The following is excerpted from Olga Grushin’s latest novel, The Charmed Wife, a sophisticated fairytale for the 21st century. Grushin was born in Moscow and moved to the United States at 18. She is the author of three previous novels, including The Dream Life of Sukhanov, which won the New York Public Library Young Lions
The story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves is, after the tale of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, the best-known of the Arabian Nights stories. The words ‘Open, Sesame!’ are famous even to people who have never read the story of the crafty thief and his adventures. But there are a number of curious
January 13, 2021, 4:41pm You can keep your Avengers spin-offs and your Twilight retellings and your Star Wars origin stories. The only bloated cash-in franchise i’m interested in is the Hannibal Lecter Expanded Universe (or HLEU, to those of us who frequent the message boards). To date, Thomas Harris’ murderous gourmand has featured in four
This is part of an ongoing conversation, Gabriel and I have been having, in various coffeeshops, in various parts of the world. Today, we two near-luddites find ourselves on Zoom, in Maine and Glasgow respectively. * Karl Geary: I thought I’d start by just embarrassing you a little bit. I was just looking through some
January 12, 2021, 1:27pm Today, Haruki Murakami celebrates his 72nd birthday—and we’re celebrating by diving into his recorded interviews. Murakami rarely gives interviews, but the ones he does are packed with insight into how he approaches the writing process. His memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running digs deep into the similarities
‘The Isle is Full of Noises’: Caliban’s speech from The Tempest has become one of the most celebrated and studied sections of Shakespeare’s play. The Tempest is, of all Shakespeare’s plays, perhaps the one filled with the most magic and enchantment; only A Midsummer Night’s Dream potentially matches it. Before we offer a summary and
George Saunders is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award; The Braindead Megaphone; and the critically acclaimed short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. He teaches in the creative writing program at
January 11, 2021, 4:07pm ATTENTION ARTISTS: The Brooklyn Public Library is looking for a new library card design. They are specifically looking for a work of art that celebrates Black American culture and history! What started as a proposal from Wendy A. Robinson of the Community Board 3’s Parks, Arts & Culture Committee is now
Translated by Martin Aitken On January 9, 1978, I was nine years old and living on a new housing estate in Tromøya outside Arendal in Norway. I’ve no idea what happened in my life on that particular day, nothing has stuck in my memory. But the records of the meteorological station at nearby Torungen Lighthouse
January 8, 2021, 10:30am This week, we should have had more time to celebrate Jon Ossoff. In the hours before Wednesday turned into a terrible day for democracy, one very good thing happened: Ossoff defeated Republican David Purdue in the Georgia special election runoff, adding his victory to Raphael Warnock’s to give Democrats control of
TODAY: In 1908, Simone de Beauvoir is born in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, France. The coup attempt was not a surprise—some readings on how we got here: Rebecca Solnit on the natural culmination of white supremacist identity politics • Timothy Denevi, in the crowd with QAnon as Trump calls for a coup • David Zucchino on the Wilmington insurrection of 1898,
One way to understand the enormity of what happened in the nation’s capitol Wednesday is to remember another terrible and historic day in 21st-century American history. The differences are immense and instructive: 9/11 was an outside job, and though the loss of life and material destruction was immense, we as a nation had a lot
January 8, 2021, 12:26pm Here’s some surprising end-of-2020 good news: books are doing . . . well? According to NPD BookScan, unit sales of print books in the United States rose 8.2% in 2020. Units hit 750.9 million this year—57.2 million up from last year. This is fairly surprising, given the pandemic was expected to
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses ‘Songs to Joannes’, a little-known work of avant-garde modernist poetry Modernist poetry, at least as it’s usually taught on university survey courses and as it’s fixed in the popular imagination, is something of a closed shop: not just because of its perceived elitism