Literature

For me, it began in the men’s underwear section. It was there that I first saw them, that carved alabaster lot, a pantheon of idolized physiques. David Beckham, Freddie Ljungberg, Jamie Dornan, and—of course, the archetype—the classical Marky Mark. Long before the Greek antiquities room at the Met in New York, I had Macy’s at

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was one of the most technically accomplished poets of the Victorian age. But as well as the sheer range of forms he mastered, there is the daring subject matter he sometimes wrote about. (He was also a colourful figure, known for his saucy private life as much as for his poetry,

June 10, 2020, 4:03pm The late illustrator Maurice Sendak would have turned 92 today, and I imagine he’d have had the same contagious attraction to childhood wonder that made him such a compelling storyteller. Well before his success with projects like Where the Wild Things Are, the Little Bear books (let’s not sleep on how good that TV

‘Methought I Saw My Late Espousèd Saint’, sometimes known as ‘On His Deceased Wife’, is one of John Milton’s best-known sonnets. It’s a moving account of grief in the face of the loss of a loved one, and Milton – better known for his religious epic poem Paradise Lost – manages to say a great

Yes, friends: for the third year in a row, I have read all of the summer reading roundups on the internet so you don’t have to. And it’s not even (technically) summer yet. If you’re new, here’s how it works: 1. I read all of the Most Anticipated and Best Summer Reading lists that flood

‘The Premature Burial’ is a story by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), written in 1844. The story taps into a fear which many people claim to harbour: taphephobia, or the fear of being buried alive. Before proceeding to our summary and analysis of this curious story, you might want to read ‘The Premature Burial’, which is

Watch Adania Shibli in conversation with Madeleine Thien about her latest novel, Minor Detail. powered by Crowdcast A searing, beautiful novel meditating on war, violence, memory, and the sufferings of the Palestinian people. Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba—the catastrophe that led to the

‘1914’ is a poem by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). As the title suggests, it’s a poem about the outbreak of the First World War, in August 1914. Before we offer some words of analysis, here’s a reminder of the poem. 1914 War broke: and now the Winter of the worldWith perishing great darkness closes in.The foul

June 9, 2020, 4:50am Another week, another brand-new batch of books to order from one of these black-owned independent bookstores! * Sam Lansky, Broken People(Hanover Square Press) “With humor, verve, and cut-to-the-bone revelations, Lansky takes readers on an enthralling adventure.”–Publishers Weekly Jennifer Worley, Neon Girls(Harper Perennial) “A vivid and erudite exploration of class struggle and gender identity.”–Kirkus

‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’ first appeared as part of the collection Words for Music Perhaps in 1932; it is one of W. B. Yeats’s later poems and part of a series of poems featuring ‘Crazy Jane’. Before we offer some words of analysis of ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’, here’s the text

June 8, 2020, 12:18pm If you were on Twitter this weekend (and are reading this) you probably came across the #PublishingPaidMe hashtag, a place for writers to reveal what they were paid by publishers for their books. Started by author LL McKinney, #PublishingPaidMe is in some ways a response to the now ubiquitous corporate declarations

Poets, as Percy Shelley memorably said, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. For W. H. Auden, poetry ‘makes nothing happen’. What role does the poet have on the political scene? Have poets engaged memorably with their own political moment? Below, we introduce ten classic political poems – poems which are ‘political’ on a range

Memoirs of Hadrian begins in illness and distance, and with a letter. “My dear Mark,” the dying emperor writes from his villa at Tibur to his eventual heir, the adolescent he blesses as Aurelius. “I have formed a project for telling you about my life [. . .] to know myself better before I die.”

Poets have written about houses, palaces, museums, towers, churches, and much else besides. Below, we introduce ten of our favourite poems about buildings and structures of various kinds. From sacred spaces to haunted houses, these buildings feature in some of the finest poems on the subject – but are there any classic poems we’ve missed

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

Probably Robert Browning’s most famous (and widely studied) dramatic monologue, ‘My Last Duchess’ is spoken by the Duke of Ferrara, chatting away to an acquaintance (for whom we, the reader, are the stand-in) and revealing a sinister back-story lurking behind the portrait of his late wife, the Duchess, that adorns the wall. It’s easy enough

TOMORROW: In 1917, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize, is born. READINGS ON RACISM, WHITE SUPREMACY AND POLICE VIOLENCE: Aaron Robertson on George Floyd and Black pessimism · Daryl Pinckney on the American tradition of anti-Black vigilantism · Angela Davis on Black Lives Matter, Palestine, and the future of radicalism · Carol Anderson on the history of respectability politics and their failure to keep Black