TODAY: In 1910, Leo Tolstoy dies. “The Babur Nama is an oddly modern text, almost Proustian in its self-awareness.” William Dalrymple on the 16th-century memoir far ahead of its time. | Lit Hub Biography “We have had no truth and reconciliation process.” On the renaissance of American white supremacy, a conversation with Isaac Bailey, Kathleen Belew, and Connor
Literature
Eight billion people are waiting for an end to the long, long race for the presidency, and more than that an end to the clownish, chaotic destructiveness of the Trump era, but the networks and other powers that be are not calling it. They’re not because, to boil down all the elaborate evasive reasons to
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle celebrates one of the great science-fiction achievements of the 1960s What’s the most prophetic book you can name? Nostradamus’ notebooks? In my book The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History , which gave its name to this Friday books column, I
November 6, 2020, 2:54pm It’s (almost) over. It’s finally (almost) over [weeps with relief, turns off TV forever, flies kite in sunlit park]. Yes, thanks to Black voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia, and Latino voters in Arizona and Nevada, it looks very much like the abject nightmare that has been the Trump presidency is
November 5, 2020, 7:00pm Tonight, at its special virtual ceremony hosted from the Austin Central Library, Kirkus Reviews announced the winners of the 7th-annual Kirkus Prizes in fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature, which celebrate the most inventive, electric, and timely fiction of the year. The Award comes with a cash prize of $50,000; previous winners include Colson
November 5, 2020, 10:00am Jason Reynolds! The two-time National Book Award Finalist, and current National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, will host the 71st National Book Awards on November 18, 2020. “To be at the forefront of ushering in the celebration of my peers would’ve been a gift at any point in my career. But
This week on The Maris Review, David Sedaris joins Maris Kreizman to discuss his latest book, The Best of Me, out now from Little Brown. *On getting comfortable with less humor: As I went on tour and time passed, I thought, okay, I know I can get a laugh there. But what would happen if
Scotland, with its mountains and hills, its banks and braes, has inspired poets – whether Scottish or otherwise – over the centuries. Here are ten of the very greatest poems about the country of Scotland. Of course, ten poems can never hope to tell the whole story, so let us know in the comments which
November 4, 2020, 2:46pm There’s a long way to go before we get to a final decision on the next president of the United States. Frankly, it’s disheartening that it’s even this close. But I am happy to report the following definitively good things that came out of last night’s election. I’m sure there are
November 3, 2020, 12:40pm As you read this sentence, voting is underway in a historic US election, a stressful contest, to put it mildly, but in this season of taking heart in the dark cackle of historical déjà vu, perhaps it’s worth remembering that while our times are strange and dangerous, chaos has been here
November 3, 2020, 1:24pm It has been a long four years. We’ve run scores of important, thought-provoking essays during the Trump Presidency, many of which will endure as crucial documents of this hard, hard time in America.* HOWEVER. One doesn’t have to look far these days for the somber or the elegiac or the thought-provoking
The signs of growing far-right extremism are all around us, and communities around the globe are struggling to understand how so many people are being radicalized and why they are increasingly attracted to violent movements. Hate in the Homeland (Princeton University Press, 2020) shows how tomorrow’s far-right nationalists are being recruited in surprising places, from
The Princess, a long narrative poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson published in 1847, is not much read or studied now. In the vast editions of Tennyson’s collected works, it languishes unread alongside his plays about Thomas Becket and his various ‘sequel’ poems (‘Mariana in the South’, ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’), although it did go
November 2, 2020, 1:51pm The World Fantasy Awards, established in 1975, honors the best fantasy fiction published during the previous calendar year. The Award is considered one of the most prestigious prizes in the genre of fantasy and speculative fiction, and comes with a small statuette of a tree in front of a tawny full
How To Proceed is a bi-monthly conversation about writing, creativity and the world we live in. Author Linn Ullmann talks to some of the world’s most exciting literary voices about their books, their writing process, and how they view the world and current events around them. We have a globally out of control situation, says
October 30, 2020, 10:29am As the story goes, eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley came up with the idea for Frankenstein one dreary summer night in 1816 while she and the poet Percy Shelley (her then lover, later husband), were vacationing in the Swiss Alps with Lord Byron, who suggested that they pass the time by each writing their
October 30, 2020, 12:08pm Priyanka Chopra, Booker Prize, Armie Hammer, Cold War spies Adam Sandler lost in space, Clooney has a bearded face Here is the week in literary film and TV news. Mindy Kaling is set to star in a HBO adaptation of Jennifer Weiner’s 2001 novel, Good in Bed. * Adam Sandler will
TODAY: In 2004, French publisher Denoël publishes Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française, consisting of two novellas written and set in 1940–1941, from a sequence left unfinished on the author’s death in Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942. The rise of the Great American Conspiracy: Renata Salecl, Jonathan Berman, and Tea Krulos talk anti-vaxxers, QAnon, incels and more. |