Literature

TODAY: In 1616, Nicolaus Copernicus’s book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres is added to the Index of Forbidden Books, 73 years after it was first published. “Every time we step away from our book there’s the danger we’re going to lose track of one or more of these threads, and the project will

‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’ is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, written in 1841. A maelstrom is a whirlpool: the word dates from at least the sixteenth century and was formed from Dutch words malen (meaning ‘grind’) and stroom (meaning ‘stream’). The story Poe weaves out of this natural phenomenon is highly suggestive,

TODAY: In 1806, poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning is born. “Words, for the first time ever, were more predictable than my business career.” Isabel Yap on the surprising lessons she learned—about writing, and life—at Harvard Business School. | Lit Hub Gabriel Weisz Carrington reflects on his mother Leonora Carrington’s newly discovered tarot, which is “endowed with a

March 5, 2021, 10:00am Did you know? Bret Easton Ellis was born this weekend (March 7, to be exact) in 1964. In honor (?) of this highly problematic Pisces, I’ve ranked all the movies that have been adapted from his books. I am aware there might be some debate about this, but #ISaidWhatISaid. 1. American

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Asimov’s second Robot novel which eerily prefigures our world On the planet of Solaria, people don’t ‘see’ each other: ‘seeing’ is viewed as abnormal, even dirty, because it means coming into contact with other people’s breath, germs, and sweaty bodies. Instead, Solarians ‘view’

March 5, 2021, 11:34am The period leading up to Ernest Hemingway’s 1954 Nobel Prize win was a pretty nightmarish one for Papa. Debilitating health problems (migraines, high blood pressure, liver disease, diabetes), near-fatal accidents (two plane crashes in as many days while vacationing in Africa in ’54 were severe enough that Hemingway spent the next

The following is excerpted from Megan Nolan’s debut novel Acts of Desperation, about the tensions between rebellion and submission, escaping degradation and eroticizing it, loving and being lovable. Nolan’s essays, fiction and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the White Review, and the Sunday Times, among others. Regular columns of her cultural commentary

Along with his contemporary, the great painter and poet Edward Lear (1812-88), Lewis Carroll, who was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-98), is one of the greatest Victorian purveyors of nonsense literature. Unlike Lear, Carroll poured his nonsense into fiction as well as some of the most famous and best-loved poems in the English language, so

March 4, 2021, 2:42pm Yes, you read that headline correctly. The first trailer for Made for Love—the upcoming HBO adaptation of Alyssa Nutting’s batshit 2017 novel—has hit the internet, and it is weird in all the most wondrous ways. Chief among them: the dulcet tones of Ray Romano, who soundtracks the action with a spoken-word

Late in 1942 a Buddhist monk living in Los Angeles carefully inscribed his name in a recently published book by the poet Wallace Stevens. The Buddhist monk had moved to Los Angeles from Japan a year earlier. The book was Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction, published by the Cummington Press, a small press in Massachusetts

Of Oscar Wilde’s various short works for children, ‘The Happy Prince’ (1888) occupies a special place as his signature tale, and is perhaps Wilde’s definitive statement about the relationship between inner and outer beauty. ‘The Happy Prince’ is a sad tale that clearly owes much to earlier fairy stories, especially the tales of Hans Christian

March 3, 2021, 4:01pm While we don’t know what the state of the our pandemic society will be come September, we can at least be sure that we’ll all be getting a little Joy Williams, as a treat. Specifically, a new novel—her fifth, and her first since 2000’s The Quick and the Dead, which was

Hosted by Paul Holdengräber, The Quarantine Tapes chronicles shifting paradigms in the age of social distancing. Each day, Paul calls a guest for a brief discussion about how they are experiencing the global pandemic. * Paul Holdengräber is joined by Johnny Temple on Episode 167 of The Quarantine Tapes. A musician and publisher, Johnny tells

Ghosts, perhaps Henrik Ibsen’s most unremittingly bleak play, caused a scandal when it was first performed in 1882. It was memorably denounced as an ‘open sewer’ by one critic, for its frank exploration of sexual promiscuity and venereal disease. Ghosts: summary Ghosts has a very small cast of characters: just five, in fact. There’s Mrs

March 2, 2021, 1:31pm 91 years ago today marks the death of D.H. Lawrence, who E.M. Forster called “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation” and whose writing Joseph Conrad called “Filth . . . nothing but obscenities.” Both can be true; today we’re remembering a work by Lawrence that is both filthy and greatly

March 1, 2021, 1:23pm Akwaeke Emezi (Freshwater, Pet, The Death of Vivek Oji) is making their romance debut with You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty. The novel, which will be published in 2022 by Atria, centers on “a young artist struggling to overcome the loss of an old love, while inviting a new

‘Expostulation and Reply’ is the ideal poem for a schoolchild to throw back at their teacher, when that teacher accuses them of being idle or not ‘doing anything’ simply because they’re not reading books at that moment. In this poem, Wordsworth stages a conversation between his boyhood self and his schoolmaster, who believes that books