December 10, 2020, 9:46am Earlier this year, Lisa Lucas announced that she would be stepping down as executive director of the National Book Foundation to become Senior Vice President & Publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books. This morning, the National Book Foundation announced that Lucas will be joining the Foundation’s Board of Directors, and that
Literature
December 9, 2020, 4:07pm The Albertine Prize, an annual reader’s-choice award, recognizes and honors US-based readers’ favorite work of contemporary French fiction that was translated and published in the US during the previous year. The Award comes with a $10,000 cash prize, split between the author and translator. This year, the winner is Zahia Rahmani, for
The Sirens were half-woman and half-bird, although they are sometimes wrongly associated with mermaids (so half-woman and half-fish), probably because of their proximity to the sea (although they were strictly land-based, they tended to hang about down on the shore so they could attract the passing boats full of hapless sailors). They were enchantresses whose
December 8, 2020, 2:57pm Maybe it was Oscar Wilde that said, “Everything in the world is about tech except tech. Tech is about power.” Even books, which some readers fetishize for the analog experience, are digitized now; and in the next logical step after Kindles and Amazon, tech-hungry readers can optimize their reading habits using
December 7, 2020, 2:53pm Apparently, Scott Frank, who wrote and directed your favorite recent Walter Tevis adaptation, The Queen’s Gambit, has another literary adaptation in the works—and it also stars Anya Taylor-Joy. The Playlist reports that Frank, speaking to the podcast The Watch, revealed that he’s got three (3) literary adaptations in the works. The
This week’s poem is a fascinating sonnet, ‘Written in the Church Yard at Middleton in Sussex’, written by the little-known female poet who did much to bring the sonnet form back into fashion among English poets and readers. Written in the Church Yard at Middleton in Sussex Pressed by the Moon, mute arbitress of tides,While
December 7, 2020, 9:30am Roald Dahl’s family and the Roald Dahl Story Company have released a short statement apologizing for the “lasting and understandable hurt” caused by Dahl’s “prejudiced remarks.” Dahl, who died in 1990, was of course a beloved author of children’s books like Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Witches but was also (in)famously
How To Proceed is a bi-monthly conversation about writing, creativity and the world we live in. Author Linn Ullmann talks to some of the world’s most exciting literary voices about their books, their writing process, and how they view the world and current events around them. Our guest in this episode is the award-winning Indian
Rarely have I encountered a character more obviously fated to become a murder victim than in The Undoing, HBO’s new six-part miniseries. This doomed person is Elena Alves, the mother of a scholarship student at an elite Manhattan prep school—the kind of outsider who, in the first episode, brings her newborn baby to a fundraising
The first time it happened, it was during the empty space, what Paul calls the “vacuum crisis.” One winter night about 12 years ago, the then-48-year-old was alone in his apartment, biding the hours between dinner and bedtime with his usual domestic chores, which distracted him from the struggles he’d endured over the past year.
TODAY: In 1826, from his boarding school, Nikolai Gogol writes home to his mother, describing a “radical new change” in his poetic style. Only two pieces he wrote during this period have survived. “I’m not saying Gravity’s Rainbow is itself earnest. Humorless. Stale. I’m not making any comment on the book’s qualities.” Patrick Allington has
In 1963 and 1964, as Louise Fitzhugh was inventing Harriet the Spy’s world, nannies and spies were very much in the public eye. Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music were in the movie theaters. John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Ian Fleming’s James Bond books were leading hardcover
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers the various symbolic meanings of the moon over the centuries The moon has been a powerful symbol in religion, literature, and art for centuries – indeed, for millennia. But delving into the history of moon-symbolism reveals some surprising things about how poets, philosophers,
TODAY: In 1987, Arnold Lobel, author of the children’s book series Frog and Toad, dies. “For some of the 20th century’s so-called children’s literature gatekeepers, Harriet was a problem child.” On the one and only Harriet the Spy. | Lit Hub “The special education advisor counsels you: ‘You can’t save them,’ she says, “sometimes you just have
This is the final episode of the 2020 Antibody Reading Series, a reading and Q and A hosted by Brian Gresko. The guests this evening are Matthew Daddona, Hafizah Geter, and Xialou Guo. [embedded content] Buy the books featured tonight from your local indie or from Bookshop: Matthew Daddona, House of Sound*Hafizah Geter, Un-American*Xialou Guo,
TODAY: In 1924, F. Sionil José, known for his epic work, The Rosales Saga, five novels encompassing a hundred years of Philippine history, is born. “I have never in my life met anyone with such an acute lexical feel for the specific word needed, for the hidden rhythm of a prose sentence.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on his
December 2, 2020, 3:31pm Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive—a harrowing memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her stepfather—has been optioned by Sony Pictures Television for development as a drama series. Recently heralded by the Washington Post and the New York Times as one
Ancient Greek mythology is full of classic stories which have become part of Western literature and culture; these stories have even given us some well-known words and phrases commonly used in English, and in other languages. Below, we introduce 12 of the greatest and best-known tales from the world of Greek mythology, from curious women