August 26, 2020, 12:02pm The International Booker Prize is awarded annually to the best book written in any language, translated into English, and published in the UK or Ireland. It comes with a whopping £50,000—shared equally between the author and translator. This year, the judges read 124 books in 30 languages. In a touching tribute
Literature
Empires and imperialism have been popular themes for poets over the centuries. The tone has often been elegiac: the impermanence of empires, their inevitably decay, and the moral and political problems the very idea of colonialism and imperialism suggest, are all frequent themes of poems about empire. Here’s our pick of ten of the best.
August 26, 2020, 12:26pm The latest in the ongoing controversy at the National Book Critics Circle: after a “special meeting” on Monday, over 130 members of the NBCC met to vote on whether or not to remove Carlin Romano from its board. Romano, you’ll remember, is the board member and former NBCC president who criticized
August 25, 2020, 12:06pm A groundbreaking children’s book based on an equally groundbreaking sports hero comes out today: Fauja Singh Keeps Going by Simran Jeet Singh, featuring the story of the first centenarian marathon runner, is also the first children’s book from a major publisher that features a Sikh main character, according to its author.
August 25, 2020, 1:07pm With voter registration deadlines approaching and misinformation around voter fraud spreading, a newly-formed coalition of writers is volunteering their time to defeat Donald Trump in the presidential election this fall. The group, Writers Against Trump—whose initial members include Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Carolyn Forché, and Natasha Trethewey—is collecting testimonies from authors
August 24, 2020, 12:04pm Welcome to the Book Marks Questionnaire, where we ask authors questions about the books that have shaped them. This week, we spoke to The Revisioners author Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. * Book Marks: First book you remember loving? Margaret Wilkerson Sexton: Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. BM: Favorite re-read?
‘England in 1819’ is a sonnet by the second-generation English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). It’s one of Shelley’s most angry and politically direct poems, although a number of the allusions Shelley makes to contemporary events require some analysis and interpretation to be fully understood now, more than two centuries on. Before we offer
August 24, 2020, 2:01pm Virginia Woolf is famous, among other things, for declaring that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” But did you know that Woolf’s own room for writing fiction was a total mess? (I didn’t either, but it’s true.) In Leonard Woolf’s
August 21, 2020, 10:00am I didn’t. But it’s true: in 1945 or 1946, Ray Bradbury (who was born 100 years ago tomorrow), then known mostly in the pulp fiction market, submitted one of his short stories, “The Homecoming,” to Mademoiselle, a fashion magazine known for publishing high quality literary fiction. It was a long shot,
August 21, 2020, 10:04am Does anyone else remember the young adult series From the Files of Madison Finn? Surely I can’t be the only one who, as an awkward and bookish middle-schooler, devoured them. The series follows twelve-year-old Madison Finn. She lives in upstate New York. Her parents are divorced. Her favorite color is orange. She
August 21, 2020, 11:15am By now, the events of Oscar Wilde’s 1882 speaking tour, which formally introduced him and his ideas to the US, are thoroughly mythologized: the unintended laughter he received at his first lecture in New York City, his visit with Walt Whitman, his oft-quoted statement to customs, “I have nothing to declare…
TODAY: In 1893, Dorothy Parker is born. “An honest photograph can be turned into almost anything by a misleading caption.” Rebecca Solnit on Twitter conspiracies, QAnon, and the case of the two-faced mailboxes. | Lit Hub Why do most movies suck? Ted Hope, film executive, contemplates mediocrity. | Lit Hub Film Must every nation have its own Sylvia Plath? Rhian Sasseen on the inescapability of Plath for writers
August 21, 2020, 11:57am Three competing design proposals are out for the forthcoming Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, a city of 112 people that sits on the southern border of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The finalists—Snøhetta, Studio Gang, and Henning Larsen—all released designs that incorporate the area’s natural landscape. Snøhetta’s design, shown
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the interesting theatrical origins of a famous phrase What does it mean to ‘steal one’s thunder’? The phrase is well-known, but its origins are less so. And to delve into the history of this now common phrase, we need to go into the
August 21, 2020, 12:09pm Lucy Ellmann, author of Ducks, Newburyport, one of the biggest books (in every sense) to come out in 2019, won this year’s James Tait Black Prize in fiction. It is among the oldest literary awards in the UK, which Ellmann’s father, Richard, won in 1982 for his biography of James Joyce. Ducks,
August 20, 2020, 2:59pm The Huntington Library, part of a beautiful complex with an art museum and botanical garden in San Marino, California, turns 100 this year and they’ve found a great way to celebrate. The library announced a one-year fellowship that will fund the study of Pasadena native Octavia Butler’s work. The only catch
August 20, 2020, 12:46pm Apparently Spotify is looking for someone to run an audiobooks division, per this very thorough analysis by Mark Williams at The New Publishing Standard. With 299 million monthly users, that could actually be a pretty huge deal for a sector of publishing that’s absolutely dominated by Amazon (aka Audible). I highly
August 19, 2020, 2:55pm An open letter published today and signed by 30 members of the National Book Critics Circle calls for sweeping changes to the organization’s structure and practices, with a specific set of recommendations meant to address inclusion, accessibility, and anti-racism. The letter advocated for adding more Black voices to the board and