Absence makes the heart grow fonder, as the old adage has it. But what have poets down the ages had to say about absences of various kinds, whether the absence of a loved one, or other absence of human company? Below, we introduce ten of the very best poems about absence. 1. William Shakespeare, ‘How
Literature
October 22, 2020, 1:22pm I can hardly remember what was happening in January of this year, much less what I was doing when I was an 18-year-old. We do have a good sense of what Jane Austen was up to, though. Historians are mostly certain about one thing: Austen was barely an adult when she wrote a
October 21, 2020, 2:12pm Thank you, universe: We’re getting a queer Canadian grunge-era comedy series about Tegan and Sara Quin directed by Clea DuVall, and there’s literally nothing I can do to make that sentence better. The show will be based on High School, the sisters’ memoir of their adolescence in Calgary, published last year by
Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott’s 1819 novel set in late twelfth-century England, has a claim to being the most influential novel of the entire nineteenth century. It was hugely popular, and remains so, with such figures as Tony Blair and Ho Chi Minh both declaring it their favourite novel. Why has Ivanhoe endured, and why did
October 21, 2020, 11:07am Did you know there was a new Tim O’Brien documentary “released” this past spring? Yup, The War and Peace of Tim O’Brien was set to hit the festival circuit over the summer, but we all know what happened next. There was mention of it in this June Esquire profile (which is
October 20, 2020, 1:54pm Oh, the Poe-like irony, a story to strike the freelancer’s heart like a lance. In 1847, a financially struggling Edgar Allan Poe wrote a letter to former Philadelphia mayor, dramatist, magazine editor, and lawyer Robert Taylor Conrad. The missive, noted as one of the highest quality Poe letters to-date, recently sold
Poets have often turned their attention to college and school, and in this post we have selected ten of the very best poems about education of various kinds, from poets remembering their schooldays and university years to poets pondering the idea of ‘education’ in a more general, abstract sense. 1. Thomas Gray, ‘Ode on a
October 20, 2020, 11:09am If you have $5 million to throw around and are looking to up your work-from-home game—by a lot—then this is for you: the beautiful loft in Tribeca that Toni Morrison lived in until her death last year is up for sale and could be yours. Designed by the architect who brought New
October 19, 2020, 1:36pm In 1775, a house was built in Dublin. This house eventually became a home to James Joyce’s great aunts, where they ran a music school in the 1890s. This house, of course (a “dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island”), was immortalized in Joyce’s 1914 short story, “The Dead.” Just in case
‘Mont Blanc’ is one of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most famous poems. ‘Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni’, to give the poem its full title, is an ode to the mountain, the highest mountain in the Alps, and compares the mountain’s mightiness with the power of the human imagination. This makes it a
October 19, 2020, 11:08am How does one browse in a dark bookstore? Picture row upon row of faced-out books lit like tiny billboards floating in an inky black room, small candle lit café tables as little islands of light between hundreds of glowing covers… That’s basically the scene at Wuguan Bookstore in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. The
I miss reading a book, alone, at a bar. I miss sitting in crowded movie theaters, watching horrible film adaptations of wonderful novels. I miss listening to authors read their books, packed in shoulder to shoulder with a small crowd around me, inhaling a writer’s every word. I really miss bookstores. Where I live in
The studio is larger than a studio; though you sleep on a fold-out futon that you do not fold out, there is a separate room with a kitchen and a small table, one you’ve bought for yourself by yourself not with or for him from whom you’ll soon be divorced. The book is on the
TODAY: In 1927, Nobel Prize Laureate Günter Grass is born. “You can feel Daniel Mendelsohn’s own delight in how this project gives him license to wander and roam.” James K.A. Smith on the radical interconnectedness of Three Rings. | Lit Hub Criticism Maybe the secret to writing is… not writing? Johanna Hedva takes an unconventional approach to putting
TODAY: In 1892, David Edelstadt, anarchist poet and editor of the Yiddish anarchist newspaper Fraye Arbeter Shtime, dies at age 26 from tuberculosis. “Lorde’s view of poetry and the imagination clarified my own inclination to disappear, at times, into my own head.” Tracy K. Smith reads Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals. | Lit Hub Biography “The
October 16, 2020, 11:32am Near the end of Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden, the 2019 film adaptation of Jack London’s 1909 novel, released today in the US, a withered Luca Marinelli as Eden tells a bemused audience, “The writer Martin Eden doesn’t exist. He is only a product of your imagination. He’s actually only a hoodlum
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys a slim but beautifully illustrated short from the world(s) of His Dark Materials Philip Pullman’s new book, Serpentine , is not a novel, nor even a novella. Nor is it technically new: it dates from 2004, although it is only being published now.
October 16, 2020, 12:00pm “Why read a book when you can watch a movie adaptation of said book?”, that’s what I always say. Better yet, just watch the trailer. Trailers are so slickly produced these days, it’s no wonder they have their own awards show. More importantly, they condense 90 percent of the story into