In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle introduces his own venture into the world of poetry At the beginning of 2020 I had little faith in this Government, but it turns out I was stupidly optimistic. Johnson (‘agent of chaos’, as I like to call him, after the Norman Spinrad novel
Literature
December 18, 2020, 10:53am It’s supremely gratifying to look upon a piece of literary adaptation news and think to yourself: perfect. Such was the warm, all-is-right-with-the-world-feeling I felt earlier this morning upon reading the announcement that Sarah Polley will direct Frances McDormand in an adaptation of Miriam Toews’ 2019 novel Women Talking (to my mind one
December 17, 2020, 4:46pm Barack Obama, the most powerful force in end of year book recommendations, has just dropped his 2020 favorites list. As we’ve come to expect from the most bookish president since John Adams (he was super into books, right?), it contains an eclectic mix of some of the year’s most acclaimed novels
December 17, 2020, 11:17am This week is a whirlwind for Shirley Jackson fans! On Monday we learned we’re getting a Jackson tribute anthology in 2021, and now, an unseen Shirley Jackson story has been published in The Strand Magazine. Jackson’s son, Laurence Hyman, found the story—“Adventure on a Bad Night”—among Jackson’s papers at the Library
December 16, 2020, 1:40pm A set of almost 300 mostly unpublished letters from The Second Sex author Simone de Beauvoir to the French novelist Violette Leduc have sold at auction for over sixty-nine thousand dollars. The collection includes a missive from 1945 where Beauvoir rejected Leduc’s romantic advances, right after Leduc sent Beauvoir the manuscript
The story of Echo and Narcissus is one of the most famous in all of classical mythology. But really, what we’re dealing with is a case of several different myths being put together. Narcissus has become synonymous with self-love, with the adjective ‘narcissistic’ and the noun ‘narcissism’ being coined to describe the sort of behaviour
December 16, 2020, 11:11am Deadline announced this morning that Kate Atkinson’s bestselling, award-winning 2014 novel Life After Life is getting the prestige television treatment with the BBC green-lighting a four-part series miniseries adaptation. House Productions have assembled an impressive creative team to bring the project to life, including Brooklyn director John Crowley and playwright/Outlaw King
December 15, 2020, 1:33pm I had a sixth grade math teacher who told us about Frank Zappa’s children, Moon Unit and Dweezil, and used their names in word problems every class. He made towering realistic paper maché dragons. He was muscular and terrifying. This is how I came to learn about Moon Unit Zappa, who
TODAY: In 1913, Muriel Rukeyser, poet and political activist, is born. “Big Manhattan book publishers publish hundreds of authors each year, but in their eyes, only a very few really matter.” Richard Jean So on the inertia of whiteness in postwar print culture. | Lit Hub History The Ultimate Best Books of 2020 List (in which we
TODAY: In 1640, Restoration author Aphra Behn, one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, is baptized. “How could we not understand this story of a baby stripped of its name, discovering its own tenacity, talents and unexpected allies as a version of our own stories?” Eric Gansworth on #NativeTwitter’s
The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood (born 1939) is best-known as a novelist, as the author of books such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. But she began her career as a poet. ‘This Is a Photograph of Me’, today’s poem, is taken from her first collection of poems, The Circle Game, which was
December 14, 2020, 7:57am John le Carré, whose given name was David Cornwell, died on Saturday, December 12, at the age of 89. The cause was pneumonia, his publisher, Penguin Random House, announced in a statement on Sunday. The best-selling author and onetime actual British spy is widely known as perhaps the world’s greatest spy
December 11, 2020, 12:17pm Disaffected thinkers smoking cigarettes listening to jazz records and gazing from your unadorned apartments onto sprawling urban landscapes, rejoice! Haruki Murakami is hosting a New Year’s Eve radio special live from a studio in Kyoto. The special will be aired on Tokyo FM’s nationwide network of 38 broadcasting stations, from 11
December 11, 2020, 12:21pm Colorado bookstore chain Tattered Cover has been acquired by an investment group that includes Kwame Spearman, who is Black, an arrangement that has led to more than a few stories referring to Tattered Cover as “the largest Black-owned bookstore in America.” This is not sitting well with Black booksellers across the
December 11, 2020, 12:41pm Some good holiday news: Costa Coffee and literacy charity The Reading Agency have teamed up to donate 100,000 books to groups hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic. In total, 50,000 book-and-coffee care packages will be donated to food banks, community hubs, hospitals and care facilities across the U.K—all prior to December
TODAY: In 1899, Herbert Putnam is appointed as the eighth Librarian of Congress. “He believed he’d learn much more by traveling with Nunamiut hunters first, questioning them about wolf behavior in general.” Barry Lopez on the wildlife biologist who changed his life as an environmentalist. | Lit Hub Nature “I personally know the author of this story
December 11, 2020, 1:52pm For Chanukah this year, we’re looking back—not back to the Maccabees, but still pretty far back. Today we’re “shining a light” (ha ha ha) on some medieval manuscripts that deal with Chanukah. Enjoy! The David Bar Pesah Mahzor, 14th-century Germany. This 1156-page two-volume text is named after its scribe and decorator,
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle examines the supposed literary origins of a popular girls’ name Where does the name Imogen come from? Some name origins are more interesting than others. And the origin of the girls’ name Imogen is more interesting than most. Imogen is a character in Cymbeline,