Yesterday’s white riot launched by the president’s incendiary rally was another reminder that there are, in the minds of too many people with too much power, those who are considered to be innocent and deserving of respect even when in the act of committing violent crimes. The corollary is that there are others assumed to
Literature
January 6, 2021, 2:03pm It’s 2021, but (surprise!) essentially nothing has changed: COVID is still ravaging the United States and no meaningful government aid has arrived. Oh, one thing has changed: a new, more contagious variant of COVID has spread to the U.S. Happy New Year! During times of crisis, carving out time to write
One of the great tragic love stories from Greek mythology, the tale of the musician Orpheus and his wife Eurydice features love, death, poetry, and the afterlife. But as with the tale of Echo and Narcissus, this is a doomed love story made more famous through Roman writers (Ovid, Virgil) than Greek originals. Before we
January 6, 2021, 2:07pm 2021 is already starting off right (movie-wise, at least): Deadline has just announced that Tiffany Haddish is in final negotiations to star in the screen adaptation of National Book Award winner M.T. Anderson’s sci-fi novel Landscape with Invisible Hand, which will be produced by MGM, Annapurna and Brad Pitt’s Plan B Productions.
January 5, 2021, 9:59am A mere four (4) days after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel contender hit the public domain, we have our very first (published) take: a prequel, by Michael Farris Smith, author of Blackwood. We first heard about Nick back in the hazy pandemic summer of 2020, and while I’m always skeptical about these
January 5, 2021, 10:42am In a world where I’m still starting every email with “I hope you’re well…ish…I mean obviously I hope you’re extremely well but I recognize that’s fairly unlikely at the moment ahahah,” it’s nice to be reminded that there are still low-stakes disputes playing out all over the world. For example: the Royal Mint
January 4, 2021, 9:35am As of January 1, 2021, a new group of copyrighted works—not only literature, of course, but film and music too—have entered the public domain in the US. This is the class of 1925, which Jane Ciabattari, writing for the BBC, called “the greatest year for books ever,” handily beating out 1862
In his 1921 essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, T. S. Eliot made several of his most famous and important statements about poetry – including, by implication, his own poetry. It is in this essay that Eliot puts forward his well-known idea of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, among other theories. You can read ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ here
January 4, 2021, 12:07pm It’s only four days into 2021 and the Internet has united around its hatred of a guy named “Bean Dad.” If you feel your brain being battered and smoothed by the tide of social media (like me) and are thinking of doing a New Year’s detox (unlike me), let George Saunders
Every Monday through Friday, AudioFile’s editors recommend the best in audiobook listening. We keep our daily episodes short and sweet, with audiobook clips to give you a sample of our featured listens. What would happen if Jesus’s second coming occurred in America, and he believed the best way to initiate a religious rebirth was with
The following is excepted from Robert Jones, Jr.’s debut novel, The Prophets, about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation. Jones has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Essence, and OkayAfrica, among others. He is the creator of the social justice social media community Son of
The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically disrupting not only our daily lives but society itself. This show features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the deeper economic, political, and technological consequences of the pandemic. It’s our new daily podcast trying to make longterm sense out of the chaos of today’s global
I can’t attend, for the road between my poem and Damascus is cut off for postmodern reasons.–“I Can’t Attend,” by Ghayath Almadhoun* No ISBN sequence can keep track the world’s recent homeless, but the books won’t stop coming. As the refugee crisis grows unremittingly, with people out of Syria, El Salvador, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Bosnia… as
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the obscure and mysterious history of a now ubiquitous word If you’re sitting comfortably, how about a quick round of the Interesting Literature Friday Night Quiz of Doom? Well, all right, just a single quiz question. Ready? Where did the word ‘posh’ come
Every Monday through Friday, AudioFile’s editors recommend the best in audiobook listening. We keep our daily episodes short and sweet, with audiobook clips to give you a sample of our featured listens. Author and narrator Becky Cooper’s true-crime audiobook, We Keep the Dead Close, chronicles her meticulous and deeply personal investigation of a fifty-year-old murder case.
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. Our guest in this episode is the German writer
In this week’s episode of Fiction/Non/Fiction, co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan are joined by novelist and essayist Claire Messud and journalist Brendan O’Meara. First, Messud discusses her new book of essays, Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, and the difficulties of grasping the facts when we’re bombarded with so much
The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically disrupting not only our daily lives but society itself. This show features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the deeper economic, political, and technological consequences of the pandemic. It’s our new daily podcast trying to make longterm sense out of the chaos of today’s global