Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle Stevie Smith (1902-71) was one of the most distinctive and individual poets of the twentieth century. Born in Hull in England as Florence Smith, she was given the nickname ‘Stevie’ after a famous jockey of the time, because she was so small. Her poetry is anything but minor, and in
Literature
September 9, 2020, 2:49pm The Women’s Prize for Fiction is one of the UK’s most prestigious annual book awards, celebrating artful and inventive literature by women from across the world. It comes with £30,000 and a limited edition bronze statuette called “Bessie” (talk about snazzy!). The Prize was founded after a year (1991) when the
Surprisingly, the etymology of “reproach”—a word that shows up on the first page of Just Us, Claudia Rankine’s new collection of essays—includes a notion of coming closer, of approaching. I have been changed and moved and reproached (in all senses of the word) by Rankine’s work since I first encountered it as a graduate student more
September 8, 2020, 3:12pm Today, Ian Williams announced the longlist for this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize, named in honor of the late literary journalist Doris Giller, which seeks to recognize the best Canadian fiction every year. (Williams, you’ll remember, won last year’s prize for his debut novel, Reproduction.) The 14 titles were chosen from a field
The following is excerpted from Elena Ferrante’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults, translated by Ann Goldstein. Ferrante is the author of seven novels, including the bestselling My Brilliant Friend and Neopolitan quartet. Goldstein is an American editor and translator from the Italian language. Once, without any warning, my aunt brought me to meet
‘The Last Laugh’ is a poem by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), drafted in February 1918 (as ‘Last Words’) but only first published after Owen’s death in November 1918, one week before the Armistice. Although not his most famous poem by any means, ‘The Last Laugh’ is one of his most stark and direct. Before we move
How To Proceed is a bi-monthly conversation about writing, creativity and the world we live in. Author Linn Ullmann talks to some of the world’s most exciting literary voices about their books, their writing process, and how they view the world and current events around them. On today’s podcast, Linn Ullmann talks to Terrance Hayes,
It seems that “Waiting For Adam: Interviews and Obsessions” by entertainment journalist Eileen Shapiro is the fun read of the summer! With glamorous pictures galore and behind the scenes secrets New Haven Publishing knew just what they were doing. The book is a light-hearted journey from star to star and country to country until Shapiro
The biggest publicist to have ever walked the face of this earth, Howard Bloom has recently released a culmination of his extraordinary experiences with those he represented in “Einstein, Michael Jackson and Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll.” The question is who didn’t he embody? The list of
Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. His previous books include the poetry collections Middle Earth, Blackbird and Wolf, Touch, and Pierce the Skin, as well as a memoir, Orphic Paris. He has received many awards for his work, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall
TODAY: In 1919, F. Scott Fitzgerald gives the manuscript of This Side of Paradise to his friend Shane Leslie to deliver to Maxwell Perkins, editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York. “My correspondence with loved ones, and particularly fellow artists, are what has kept me aloft in recent months in this era of
September 4, 2020, 10:07am As the election nears and House Democrats continue to spar with USPS Postmaster General Louis Dejoy, one could be forgiven for feeling anxious about the mail. On Monday, the UCLA Voting Rights Project published a report on the need to build trust among Americans in the vote-by-mail process. Although the president’s
TODAY: In 1921, The Cervantes Theatre in Buenos Aires opens with a production of Lope de Vega’s La dama boba. “He died a terrible death, his chest working overtime like he often did in the mill.” Kerri Arsenault on life and death in a Maine mill town. | Lit Hub Memoir She hoped that children who played her
September 4, 2020, 10:14am I love old Volkswagen vans and I love bookstores and because it’s Friday I also love feel good stories (I also love hardworking local newspaper headlines, but that’s another story). So that’s why I’m bringing your attention to the story of Melanie Moore, who at the very last second—the night before
September 4, 2020, 12:26pm Izumi Suzuki, whose works of science fiction have earned her a special place in Japanese counterculture, will soon make her English-language debut with a story collection whose synopsis sounds almost unbearably cool. Verso Books will publish Terminal Boredom, a short story collection, in April 2021, and another collection titled Love<Death the
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses an early Tennyson poem Who invented ‘free verse’? Walt Whitman (1819-92) often gets the credit, although his decision to write in free verse – unrhymed poetry without a regular metre or rhythm – may have been influenced by the Biblical Psalms. Before Whitman,
My favorite activity, my only faithful daily ritual, is to check the mail. My husband pokes fun, but whenever I’m not traveling he lovingly leaves the task to me. These days, it goes without saying, I’m always home. And while time has become a confounding concept of late (What day is it? How many weeks
September 3, 2020, 3:31pm If you want to understand the deep well of creativity author Ursula K. Le Guin drew from at a young age, you should probably start at home. Le Guin, the California-born author known for her Earthsea fantasy series and novels like The Left Hand of Darkness, thought fondly of her childhood home in Berkeley,