Literature

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of a given name in a little-known eighteenth-century poem Here’s a question for you. What connects the girls’ name Vanessa with the classic novel Gulliver’s Travels? The answer: they were both created by the same person. His name was Jonathan Swift

October 30, 2020, 1:33pm On this very day, in 1938, Orson Wells broadcasted an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. It aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System network as a special Halloween episode. It begins like this: “We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century, this world was

Welcome to the virtual book launch of Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Tales of Horror, brought to you by The Antibody Reading Series in collaboration with WORD Bookstore (buy from the bookstore here). Tonight’s guests include editors Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto, along with contributors Meg Elison, Rachel Heng, Troy L. Wiggins, and Stephen Graham Jones. * [embedded

Although Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) – known as ‘Jack’ to his friends and family – is best-known for his seven children’s fantasy novels set in the land of Narnia, C. S. Lewis wrote a number of other works – fiction and non-fiction, science fiction and literary criticism – which have become classics in their field.

October 29, 2020, 1:36pm The late French author Romain Gary is the only writer to have won France’s most prestigious literary award under two names: he received the Prix Goncourt for The Roots of Heaven (Les Racines du ciel; 1956) under his birth name and, more than 20 years later, “Émile Ajar” won the prize for The Life

“Should we watch Rosemary’s Baby?” I asked my partner Monday night. In the moment, I was thinking only of our dwindling window to watch scary movies together; I avoid horror but make an exception for October. Like most classic films I’ve never seen, I had an assumed storyline of the movie in my head, cobbled

Mark Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a masterclass of irony and the way rhetoric can be used to say one thing but imply something quite different without ever naming it. Mark Antony delivers a funeral speech for Julius Caesar following Caesar’s assassination at the hands of Brutus and the conspirators,

October 28, 2020, 1:17pm With the end of the year (unbelievably) approaching, there’s a new opportunity for writers of color to kick off 2021: a new mentorship program, created by some of the most accomplished writers in journalism and literary media today, is taking applications now. The PERIPLUS collective, which aims to support emerging BIPOC

October 27, 2020, 3:39pm This one goes out to all the writers in the Year of our Lord 2020, as we all worry that our total inability to put a sentence together could turn into a lifetime of non-production: It’s never too late. Wole Soyinka, who in 1986 became the first person from sub-Saharan Africa

The story of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods is, like the story of Pandora’s Box, an important ‘origin-story’ from Greek myth. But there’s much more to Prometheus than the ‘stealing fire’ story. Let’s delve into the world of Greek mythology, from over two thousand years ago, to see why Prometheus is such a central,

October 27, 2020, 11:05am Here’s an unusual bit of adaptation news: the painter Michaela Yearwood-Dan has created a limited edition cover for the November issue of Harper’s Bazaar‘s Bazaar Art based on Margaret Atwood’s poem “Feather,” from her latest book Dearly, her first collection of poetry in over a decade. You can read the poem here. “I

October 26, 2020, 4:12pm Today, the American Language Association (ALA) announced the longlist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. The prize, established in 2012, honors the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published in the U.S. in the previous year, and comes with a $5,000 purse. Previous

Although the phrase ‘lest we forget’ is now closely associated with Remembrance Sunday and war remembrance more generally, it actually originated in a poem written almost twenty years before the outbreak of the First World War: Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Recessional’. Before we offer a summary and analysis of ‘Recessional’, here’s the text of the poem: Recessional

October 26, 2020, 1:51pm Today, the New York Public Library announced the launch of its latest service, Shelf Help, a tool that provides its patrons with personalized book bundles curated by skilled librarians. Shelf Help is the Library’s latest initiative to support New York City during the pandemic. “There is a wonderful moment of serendipity

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the lasting power of Ovid’s great poem Ovid’s wasn’t the first Metamorphoses. Before him, there was Nicander’s Heteroeumena, whose title is usually translated as ‘metamorphoses’, but Nicander’s poem has been lost. It was Ovid’s vast retelling of the great myths of Greek and

October 23, 2020, 1:06pm I wanted to say something beautifulhow we turn garbage into goldhow we made a swamp fertile landhow we turned a curse, into a blessing. –Abioudun Oyewole * Last Sunday, the English artist Richard Kraft gave Donald Trump nearly 50 penalty cards following one of his weekend rallies. While I watched the

This is episode 18 of The Antibody Reading Series, a weekly reading and Q and A hosted by Brian Gresko. The guests this evening are Angela Chen, Athena Dixon, and Melissa Faliveno. [embedded content] Buy the books featured tonight from your local indie or from Bookshop: Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society,

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