Literature

TODAY: In 1921, Patricia Highsmith is born. “To really engage with craft is to engage with how we know each other,” and 24 other notes on craft from Matthew Salesses. | Lit Hub Craft Daniel Allen Cox on redefining Armageddon—during a global pandemic—after growing up among Jehovah’s Witnesses. | Lit Hub Say hello to the

‘I am thy father’s spirit’: so speaks the Ghost to Hamlet in William Shakespeare’s play. We have analysed Hamlet as a whole in more detail here, but the ‘I am thy father’s spirit’ speech calls for further close analysis to tease out the meaning of the Ghost’s words. The Ghost is claiming to be Hamlet’s

January 15, 2021, 10:27am In 1979, Highsmith joined Roy Plomley on Desert Island Discs, the BBC Radio show in which famous people choose exactly what the name implies. Plomley, of course, starts out with a softball: “Miss Highsmith, could you endure prolonged loneliness?” Ah, the most contemporary question there is. “I think I could better

January 15, 2021, 11:23am Though the looming threat of white supremacist violence is a good reason to dread Joe Biden’s inauguration, the roster of performers—including Tom Hanks, Lady Gaga, and Jennifer Lopez—is looking pretty good. Add to the list Amanda Gorman, the 22-year-old who will read a poem at the ceremony. Gorman will be the

January 15, 2021, 12:00pm Cornering the market of people who are addicted to TikTok and take a scholarly interest in the rollicking old melodies of the high seas, British Library Publishing is set to rush-print a guide to sea shanties. If you know why this is happening, you know, and if you don’t—or, like at

January 15, 2021, 12:05pm Tessa Thompson is quite the force to be reckoned with. From her early films Mississippi Damned (2009) and Dear White People (2014) to her groundbreaking film Sylvie’s Love (2020), Thompson has proven herself an actor of tremendous talent and wit. Now, she is launching a new production company called Viva Maude, with a first look, two-year

TODAY: In 1900, Kiku Amino, Japanese author and translator of English and Russian literature, is born. When white supremacist mobs threaten democracy: David Zucchino on the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 and the Capitol Insurrection of 2021. | Lit Hub Politics Navigating the intricacies of race and the violence of antiblackness: Nadia Owusu reflects on her early years in America. | Lit Hub Memoir 2021’s TV

January 15, 2021, 12:33pm If you have ever wanted to own a typewriter that looks like a computer and has no paper and costs five hundred dollars, you’re in luck: the productivity tool company Astrohaus has created the Freewrite, a “distraction-free writing instrument.” According to Astrohaus’s website, the Freewrite’s goal is to “marry old and

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning and origin of a well-known proverb ‘Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’ It’s become a proverb, and proverbs are, usually, authorless. Actually, that’s not really true. Although ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ or

January 15, 2021, 12:54pm Earlier this year, we learned of the founding of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which is the first English-language literary award to celebrate excellence in fiction by women writers in the United States and Canada. And today, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction announced that it has received a $250,000

TODAY: In 1933, Ernest J. Gaines is born. What if the stories we tell in order to live happen to be conspiracy theories? William J. Bernstein on the evolutionary origins of collective delusion. | Lit Hub History Refugee, resident, dissident: Yiyun Li introduces Bette Howland’s 1974 memoir about her stay in a Chicago psychiatric hospital. |

January 14, 2021, 2:34pm Less than a month on from the movie poster controversy (Cherrk!) that rocked the internet to its very core, the first trailer for Cherry—the Tom Holland-starring film adaptation of Nico Walker’s 2018 semi-autobiographical debut novel about an Iraq War veteran turned drug addict turned bank robber—has dropped. Directed by the Russo Brothers,

The following is excerpted from Olga Grushin’s latest novel, The Charmed Wife, a sophisticated fairytale for the 21st century. Grushin was born in Moscow and moved to the United States at 18. She is the author of three previous novels, including The Dream Life of Sukhanov, which won the New York Public Library Young Lions

The story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves is, after the tale of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, the best-known of the Arabian Nights stories. The words ‘Open, Sesame!’ are famous even to people who have never read the story of the crafty thief and his adventures. But there are a number of curious

January 13, 2021, 4:41pm You can keep your Avengers spin-offs and your Twilight retellings and your Star Wars origin stories. The only bloated cash-in franchise i’m interested in is the Hannibal Lecter Expanded Universe (or HLEU, to those of us who frequent the message boards). To date, Thomas Harris’ murderous gourmand has featured in four

This is part of an ongoing conversation, Gabriel and I have been having, in various coffeeshops, in various parts of the world. Today, we two near-luddites find ourselves on Zoom, in Maine and Glasgow respectively. * Karl Geary: I thought I’d start by just embarrassing you a little bit. I was just looking through some

January 12, 2021, 1:27pm Today, Haruki Murakami celebrates his 72nd birthday—and we’re celebrating by diving into his recorded interviews. Murakami rarely gives interviews, but the ones he does are packed with insight into how he approaches the writing process. His memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running digs deep into the similarities

‘The Isle is Full of Noises’: Caliban’s speech from The Tempest has become one of the most celebrated and studied sections of Shakespeare’s play. The Tempest is, of all Shakespeare’s plays, perhaps the one filled with the most magic and enchantment; only A Midsummer Night’s Dream potentially matches it. Before we offer a summary and