February 5, 2021, 9:30am Because it’s a pandemic, we have a new baby, and we already finished Top Chef, my husband and I have been watching Sex and the City. It’s his first time watching it, but—yes, I am a white woman in my 30s—not mine. I owned all the DVDs in college, before all TV
Literature
February 4, 2021, 3:58pm If you don’t hang out in the New York Review of Books Letters section, you may have missed this fairly heated exchange between Rumaan Alam and Ruth Franklin, who reviewed his National Book Award-nominated novel Leave the World Behind in the publication’s last issue. The review in question was mixed (at least according to
The Anglo-American modernist poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was arguably the most influential poet of the twentieth century. With poems like ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, The Waste Land, ‘The Hollow Men’, and Four Quartets, Eliot changed the landscape of poetry forever. T. S. Eliot is also one of the most quotable poets
February 4, 2021, 10:22am For several summers, between college semesters, I was a hostess at an Alice in Wonderland-themed restaurant in Manhattan called Alice’s Teacup. At the time, I was living in Gravesend, Brooklyn, so I would leave my home at six in the morning to make it to the Upper East Side in time
February 3, 2021, 2:04pm 2020 was a hard year for bookstores, for obvious (pandemic) reasons, and the UK-based retailer Waterstones is no exception: last March, it closed its 280 UK branches due to health concerns and the majority of staff were placed on furlough. The UK’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme allowed the government to pay
In some ways Scandinavia’s answer to the tale of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, ‘The Tinder Box’ was one of Hans Christian Andersen’s first fairy tales. ‘The Tinder Box’ contains a number of common fairy-tale tropes: the magic helper with the ability to grant wishes, the ‘rags to riches’ motif, a witch, and a beautiful
February 3, 2021, 10:00am Here’s some wonderful literary news to start your morning (drumroll, please): today, United States Artists (USA) announced its 2021 USA Fellows, which includes eight writers. The award honors the creative accomplishments of its selected fellows by supporting their ongoing artistic and professional development with an unrestricted $50,000 fellowship. According to the
February 2, 2021, 1:38pm Lena Dunham is busy! She’s costarring with Mandy Patinkin, writing moving personal essays for Harper’s, and declaring her sexuality is “the fact that Viggo Mortensen owns a poetry publishing press”—and this spring, she starts shooting in the U.K. for her adaptation of Karen Cushman’s YA classic Catherine, Called Birdy. Dunham is
A Doll’s House is one of the most important plays in all modern drama. Written by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in 1879, the play is well-known for its shocking ending, which attracted both criticism and admiration from audiences when it premiered. Before we offer an analysis of A Doll’s House, it might be worth
February 2, 2021, 9:41am In what is clearly a play for that sweet, sweet newsletter market, Twitter announced last week it has bought Revue “a service that makes it free and easy for anyone to start and publish editorial newsletters,” and will be rolling out the option this week. Even though Substack seems to have
February 1, 2021, 2:11pm Some light snowstorm viewing for you: Gore Vidal and Kurt Vonnegut and Jill Krementz having a wonderful time. In under two minutes, Vidal—known for his mean witticisms—hits on Jill Krementz; says he was the first choice for Vonnegut’s cameo in Back to School (where Vonnegut plays himself); and owns up to
‘We Are Seven’ is one of the most famous poems by William Wordsworth to appear in the 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads, the book which he co-authored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Indeed, after ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, ‘We Are Seven’ is probably Wordsworth’s most widely known and best-loved poem in the collection.
February 1, 2021, 9:50am Every six months or so we get news* of agents charging writers to read their submissions or asking for up-front fees ahead of representation… WRITERS! Do not do this. Reputable agents will not ask you for money: they will sell your work and take a commission. The latest example, caught by
January 29, 2021, 11:14am It’s Friday AND it’s Anton Chekhov’s birthday AND we’re in the middle of an endless pandemic so I’m going to rank the following images of young Chekhov according to their hotness. Because I am a serious literary man. 10. Is that the very first whisper of chin hair on babyface young
January 29, 2021, 11:52am It’s Friday, so why not look at some pictures of beautiful (literature-inspired) dresses that cost as much as pretty nice cars! Designer Kim Jones told British Vogue that his first collection for the luxury fashion house Fendi was inspired by the Bloomsbury Group, specifically Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. “They were like a
January 29, 2021, 11:55am It’s been a whirlwind month for Amanda Gorman: in the nine days since the 22-year-old poet delivered her original poem “The Hill We Climb” at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, she’s been announced to perform at the Super Bowl; signed to IMG Models; and her two forthcoming books, The Hill We Climb
TODAY: In 1931, Australian novelist, short story writer, and essayist Shirley Hazzard, is born. Happy weekend: here’s (one of) Joan Didion’s seminal essay(s), “Why I Write.” | Lit Hub Astrophysicist Avi Loeb investigates that giant interstellar object that passed through our solar system (please tell us you haven’t forgotten about ‘Oumuamua!). | Lit Hub Science “Much of what has been created to
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the meaning of T. S. Eliot’s famous opening words to his greatest poem ‘April is the cruellest month’ is the opening line to T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land. There are, actually, two things I could say in response to the