July 8, 2020, 3:25pm Authors including Colson Whitehead, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., and Adam Rutherford are cancelling events at the Free Library of Philadelphia over complaints from Black employees that they have been mistreated and undervalued there. An open letter from Black employees says that “Black staff routinely experience racial discrimination, harassment, microaggressions, and other
Literature
Monuments often lie. Political elites erect them in the name of one sanctioned collective narrative or another, and they come down by violence or by decree as historical winds shift. In 1776 American patriots toppled an equestrian statue of King George. Not one of the thousands of statues of Lenin that were once all over
July 7, 2020, 5:11pm The artist’s retreat formerly known as the MacDowell Colony announced today that it would drop the “Colony” from its name going forward and be known simply as MacDowell (which is, I gather, what the cool kids have been calling it for years, anyway). Nell Painter, MacDowell’s board chair, said the decision
The following story is excerpted from Last One Out Shut Off the Lights by Stephanie Soileau. Soileau‘s fiction has appeared in Tin House, Oxford American, and Glimmer Train, among other magazines, and has been reprinted numerous times in New Stories from the South. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been
‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’ is one of Robert Browning’s most celebrated dramatic monologues: it first appeared in Browning’s 1842 collection Dramatic Lyrics. As ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’ is a relatively long poem, perhaps the best way to offer an analysis of the poem is by going through it, stanza by stanza, and analysing
The following is excerpted from from Daphne Merkin’s new novel, 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love. Merkin is the author of the novel Enchantment, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for best novel on a Jewish theme, as well as two collections of essays, and a memoir, This Close to Happy. A former staff writer
Hosted by Paul Holdengräber, The Quarantine Tapes chronicles shifting paradigms in the age of social distancing. Each day, Paul calls a guest for a brief discussion about how they are experiencing the global pandemic. For Mona Eltahawy, one of the biggest lessons she learned from her activism in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution is that the
TODAY: In 1855, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is published. Dispatches from writers in America: Tracy K. Smith’s letter to Black America • From Newark Nyle Fort writes to his nephew about trauma and uprising. | Lit Hub Chrome-plated pistols and pink polos: Rebecca Solnit on the face of elite panic in the USA. | Lit
The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically disrupting not only our daily lives but society itself. This show features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the deeper economic, political, and technological consequences of the pandemic. It’s our new daily podcast trying to make longterm sense out of the chaos of today’s global
The author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World, and Eileen, joins Books & Books’ events coordinator, Cristina Nosti, for a virtual conversation on bookstores, craft, isolation, film, humor, art, love and death. Moshfegh talks in-depth and reads from her latest novel of haunting, metaphysical suspense, Death In Her Hands, about
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses a poem that represents the meeting-point of ancient riddle and modern nonsense ‘I Saw a Peacock’ is an anonymous nonsense poem that is included in Quentin Blake’s The Puffin Book of Nonsense Verse (Puffin Poetry), a wonderful anthology which I’d recommend to any
The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically disrupting not only our daily lives but society itself. This show features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the deeper economic, political, and technological consequences of the pandemic. It’s our new daily podcast trying to make longterm sense out of the chaos of today’s global
We are two hours north of the relentless sirens, our Bronx soundscape these months. That moment where car-weary conversations border on delusional. “Mom, can we have an All-American experience when we get there? Like jumping from a rafter into a haystack?” We laugh and miss our turn. We search for a shoulder to turn around
July 2, 2020, 12:13pm Yesterday, a tweet from Liberation Library, an organization that provides books to incarcerated children (yes, you read that right), went viral. It was a photograph of thank-you letter written by a child in custody, to the organization, expressing gratitude for the books. A letter from one of our readers: “I wanted
The following is excerpted from the Georgia Review‘s Summer 2020 issue. Laura van den Berg is the author of two story collections and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel. She is the recipient of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and a PEN/O. Henry Award, and a two-time finalist for
Poets have often paid tribute to particular locations in their poetry, writing paeans to beautiful landscapes, bustling cities, or areas of historical or personal significance. Below, we introduce ten of our favourite poems about places of various kinds, in Britain, America, and elsewhere. Anonymous, ‘The Cries of London’. The author of this seventeenth-century poem about
July 1, 2020, 3:59pm When John Prine died earlier this year, there were a few things his obituary writers agreed on. If you weren’t a huge music fan, you might not have known who he was. If you knew who he was, you undoubtedly loved him. And if you really loved him, you knew that
Ever since Trump was elected, we have been living through things that we would find overplayed and unbelievable in fiction and film and they keep on coming. Sunday night they came in the form of a rich, white sixty-something couple waving deadly weapons at a St. Louis Black Lives Matter march. The casually dressed personal