December 22, 2020, 3:46pm Today, the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference (SVWC) announced that American author, essayist, and fiction writer Barry Lopez has been awarded its inaugural Writer in the World Prize, which recognizes and honors a writer whose work expresses a “rare combination of literary talent and moral imagination, helping us to better understand the world
Literature
December 22, 2020, 12:34pm This week, New York City’s public library systems released their annual top 10 checkouts lists. These lists are always an intriguing window into the literary tastes of Gotham’s denizens, but this year’s are of particular interest. Why? Well, I for one am curious to know just how New Yorkers chose to
December 21, 2020, 10:31am Some good news to close out the year! Recently, Roxane Gay announced on Twitter that she’s starting a book club, and anyone can participate. The Audacious Book Club will span at least one year, and the reading list for 2021 has already been finalized: Jenna Wortham and Kimberly Drew, Black Futures
‘Dark House, by Which Once More I Stand’ is one canto (the seventh) from a much longer work of poetry, In Memoriam A. H. H. by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92). The poem shows Tennyson revisiting the home of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, whose untimely death in 1833 inspired the poem. Before we proceed to
December 21, 2020, 12:24pm Continuing on the Barack Obama’s Favorite Media end-of-year march, the former President has released a 20-song playlist to accompany his memoir A Promised Land, composed of songs that recall memories of his time on the campaign trail and in the White House. There’s some Beyonce, some John Coltrane, some Sade, some
The year is at an end, and I think I speak for pretty much everyone when I say: good riddance. (While we don’t have any guarantee that 2021 will be an improvement, it seems like it would have to be.) Among the many unhappinesses of this year, we lost what seems like an unusually large
It seems appropriate for me to reflect first on the undistinguished chair I’m sitting in as I try to put together a few words to introduce you to this biography of Richard Nelson. I bought the chair long ago in a second-hand store, in Springfield, Oregon. I’ve had to repair it occasionally, to ensure its
2020 was a hard year for reading—it was a hard for so many things. Like wearing clothes some days. Or bathing. Or saying goodbye, or trying to mourn. It was a hard year for voting in public or for living with someone you love. It was a hard year in which to believe in the possibilities
TODAY: In 1903, the first of G. K. Chesterton’s short stories, “The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown,” appears in Harper’s Weekly. The Ultimate Best Books of 2020 List (in which we read all the year-end lists so you don’t have to). | Lit Hub “As is so often the case, editorial passion conquered timid conventional wisdom, and
TODAY: In 1985, Vietnamese poet Xuân Diệu dies. In memoriam: some of the writers, editors, and great literary minds we lost this year. | Lit Hub Yarden Katz: AI systems are as much a tool of whiteness as any other system of power. | Lit Hub Tech The Best Reviewed Graphic Literature and Literature in Translation of 2020. | Lit Hub, Book Marks
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle introduces his own venture into the world of poetry At the beginning of 2020 I had little faith in this Government, but it turns out I was stupidly optimistic. Johnson (‘agent of chaos’, as I like to call him, after the Norman Spinrad novel
December 18, 2020, 10:53am It’s supremely gratifying to look upon a piece of literary adaptation news and think to yourself: perfect. Such was the warm, all-is-right-with-the-world-feeling I felt earlier this morning upon reading the announcement that Sarah Polley will direct Frances McDormand in an adaptation of Miriam Toews’ 2019 novel Women Talking (to my mind one
December 17, 2020, 4:46pm Barack Obama, the most powerful force in end of year book recommendations, has just dropped his 2020 favorites list. As we’ve come to expect from the most bookish president since John Adams (he was super into books, right?), it contains an eclectic mix of some of the year’s most acclaimed novels
December 17, 2020, 11:17am This week is a whirlwind for Shirley Jackson fans! On Monday we learned we’re getting a Jackson tribute anthology in 2021, and now, an unseen Shirley Jackson story has been published in The Strand Magazine. Jackson’s son, Laurence Hyman, found the story—“Adventure on a Bad Night”—among Jackson’s papers at the Library
December 16, 2020, 1:40pm A set of almost 300 mostly unpublished letters from The Second Sex author Simone de Beauvoir to the French novelist Violette Leduc have sold at auction for over sixty-nine thousand dollars. The collection includes a missive from 1945 where Beauvoir rejected Leduc’s romantic advances, right after Leduc sent Beauvoir the manuscript
The story of Echo and Narcissus is one of the most famous in all of classical mythology. But really, what we’re dealing with is a case of several different myths being put together. Narcissus has become synonymous with self-love, with the adjective ‘narcissistic’ and the noun ‘narcissism’ being coined to describe the sort of behaviour
December 16, 2020, 11:11am Deadline announced this morning that Kate Atkinson’s bestselling, award-winning 2014 novel Life After Life is getting the prestige television treatment with the BBC green-lighting a four-part series miniseries adaptation. House Productions have assembled an impressive creative team to bring the project to life, including Brooklyn director John Crowley and playwright/Outlaw King
December 15, 2020, 1:33pm I had a sixth grade math teacher who told us about Frank Zappa’s children, Moon Unit and Dweezil, and used their names in word problems every class. He made towering realistic paper maché dragons. He was muscular and terrifying. This is how I came to learn about Moon Unit Zappa, who