June 22, 2020, 4:16pm Last Friday, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods celebrated its 19th publication anniversary. Earlier this year, The Annotated American Gods was published. Leslie Klinger, the attorney/genre fiction annotator/writer/Sherlock Holmes super fan who annotated the new edition answered a few of my questions about the book over email. * Aaron Robertson: I enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek, poetic quality of the
Literature
Divided into six parts, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ is, along with ‘Easter 1916’, probably W. B. Yeats’s best-known political poem. It is also among his longer and more ambitious works. In this post, we’ll offer a summary and analysis of the poem, taking it section by section. Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen I. Many ingenious lovely
June 22, 2020, 9:32am Around these parts, there are few things we love more than ogling beautiful book covers—and it turns out, even the “book” part is negotiable. Enter: designer and illustrator Matt Stevens’ ongoing project (and soon-to-be book) Good Movies as Old Books, which reimagines some of Stevens’ favorite contemporary movies—from Parasite to Gattaca to Do the
TODAY: In 1903, Jack London’s novel The Call of the Wild begins serialization in the Saturday Evening Post “I went quiet the very moment everyone else seemed to get louder.” Brandon Taylor on managing private anxiety during a very public pandemic. | Lit Hub What is an escapist read in 2020? Deborah Shapiro suggests some fiction for the unsettling moods
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. Today on episode 62 of The Quarantine Tapes, Paul Holdengräber is joined by poet, scholar, and president of The Andrew W.
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
Damian Barr’s Literary Salon tempts the world’s best writers to read exclusively from their latest greatest works and share their own personal stories. Star guests include Jojo Moyes, John Waters, Yaa Gyasi, Mary Beard, Diana Athill and Louis de Bernières—all in front of a live audience at leading glamorous locations world-wide. Our London home is
Juneteenth commemorates the June 19, 1865 arrival of Union troops in Galveston, Texas—over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation—who brought with them official news of the end of slavery in the United States. Long a day of celebration of Black life and family in America, Juneteenth should become a national holiday not so the whole
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle ponders the significance of the humble toothbrush in modern poetry ‘As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can’t put toothbrushes in a poem, I really can’t!’ Sylvia Plath’s statement – made in a 1962
I was in the car with my mother earlier this week when the CFO at her company called. She groaned and put him on speaker. Before I got out to walk into a store, the executive said, “Cindy, I wanted to ask you about that Juneteenth email…” My mother and I are African-American. You can
The diarist Samuel Pepys wasn’t a fan of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Seeing a performance of the play in 1662, he wrote in his diary that it was ‘the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life’ (though he adds that he liked the dancing, as well as the ‘handsome women’
June 18, 2020, 2:44pm After spending the week getting destroyed by Gen Z on TikTok, here’s some good news for millennials: every 90s kid’s favorite portmanteau-titled book series is finally(?) getting a film adaptation. For the unacquainted(/Irish), the Animorphs were a scrappy gang of teens who, according to Wikipedia (because I could not remember, sorry),
‘The Kind Ghosts’ is not one of Wilfred Owen’s best-known war poems, but it deserves to be better-known. In just twelve lines, Owen (1893-1918) contrasts the sleepy attitude of Britain’s civilians with the sacrifice being made by countless British men in the theatre of war. Owen revised ‘The Kind Ghosts’ in July 1918, just a
June 18, 2020, 10:44am Practical Magic just may be the best movie of all time. Every time the leaves get crisp and the jack o’lanterns come out, I put on that sweet ’90s soundtrack. (Okay, it’s on right now and Stevie Nicks is singing “If You Ever Did Believe.”) I watch it multiple times a
If one were to compile a list of the most outrageous, scandalous, and provocative poets in all of English literature, one name would have to lead all the rest: John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647-80). His colourful private (and public) life at the court of King Charles II was dramatised in the film The
June 17, 2020, 12:30pm The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) has announced the finalists for the sixth annual Firecracker Awards, which honor the best independently published fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Mark your calendars: the winners will be announced on June 30th. * FICTION Flowers of Mold by Ha Seong-nan, translated by Janet
‘Perfect Woman’, sometimes known by its first line, ‘She was a phantom of delight’, is a poem William Wordsworth (1770-1850) wrote in 1804 about his wife, Mary Hutchinson. The poem is a classic example of uxorious poetry – poetry written about the love for a wife – and although its meaning is fairly straightforward, a
June 17, 2020, 12:57pm The Room Where It Happened, John Bolton’s memoir of his time in the Trump administration, is the #1 bestseller on Amazon in advance of its release on June 23, even as the government has sued to slow its publication. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, claims that Bolton did not fully cooperate with the