Literature

Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle George Orwell (1903-50), born Eric Arthur Blair, is one of the most important writers of the first half of the twentieth century, and his essays and novels have continued to influence many journalists and writers since his death. The term ‘Orwellian’ has entered the dictionary, and many terms he coined

September 2, 2020, 3:56pm When Charles Andrew was a boy in Monroeville, a city in Alabama that today numbers under 6,000 residents, he used to watch the 1962 film adaption of To Kill a Mockingbird in the town’s segregated, single-screen theater. “It didn’t strike me that we were sitting in the Black section of the theater,” Andrew

I’ve been playing Monopoly with J every evening for a week and I haven’t won a single game. J plays with abandon, buys indiscriminately, and wins repeatedly. Tonight he’s thrown a suspicious number of doubles, so I accuse him of cheating. He’s not cheating, he explains to me happily, he’s just a lucky person. The

September 1, 2020, 2:45pm Congratulations to Ethan Hawke, star of my favorite film (Gattaca) and arguably the most bookish man in Hollywood, who has, with today’s inclusion in the (web) pages of the New York Times Book Review, completed his Literary World Bingo Card! What is the Literary World Bingo Card you ask? Well, let

August 31, 2020, 4:11pm Honestly . . . maybe. It was Mary Shelley’s birthday yesterday, and to celebrate her, let’s pause for a moment to unpack one of the most frequently-circulated stories about her: that she had sex for the first time on top of her own mother’s grave, with Percy Shelley. As sensational as

‘Acquainted with the Night’ is a poem by Robert Frost (1874-1963), published in 1928. One of Frost’s most popular short poems, it is slightly unusual in his oeuvre in focusing on the urban rather than rural world of many of his other famous poems. You can read ‘Acquainted with the Night’ here before proceeding to

August 31, 2020, 12:34pm The first trailer for the upcoming CBS miniseries The Stand—the latest in a seemingly never-ending stream of big-budget, star-studded adaptation of Stephen King novels—dropped last night during the MTV Video Music Awards (which is apparently still a thing) and fans are pumped (I’m guessing. I haven’t checked.) Now, despite hearing many

The following story “The Language of Cats and Dogs” is from Susan Minot’s collection of stories Why I Don’t Write. Susan Minot’s first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Étranger in France. Her novel Evening was a worldwide best seller and became a major motion picture. She received

August 28, 2020, 10:11am With very few exceptions, if I’ve even partially enjoyed a book, and someone has bothered to adapt that book into a movie, I will seek out and watch said movie. Often this proves a mistake, and my pleasant memories of a novel become irrevocably tainted by a bland or clumsy or

August 28, 2020, 11:44am As both a social media editor and a sometimes-writer who is on Twitter, I feel uniquely qualified to say that writers shouldn’t be on Twitter. I know: everyone has to hustle. Twitter can be a “community.” Personally, though, I find that the more a writer tweets, the less interested I am

TODAY: In 1992,  Mary Norton, author of The Borrowers series, dies. “Animals aren’t just repositories for human meanings, even if we unthinkingly use them to reflect our own selves and concerns.” Helen Macdonald offers some hard-won wisdom for writing about the natural world. | Lit Hub Craft “You were a sweet and powerful man, walking through the fire of your time.”

August 28, 2020, 1:01pm Just a friendly reminder that tomorrow, August 29th, is Independent Bookstore Day. This year, the festivities will be both online and in-person at 600+ local bookstores around the country, starting tonight with a conversation between Mary Norris and Ann Goldstein about Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults. Sure, every day

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews an early example of ‘gritty’ epic fantasy It was the late, great Terry Pratchett who observed that most modern fantasy is just rearranging the furniture in Tolkien’s attic. And many innovations within the genre have tended to use the same tropes, character types,

August 28, 2020, 1:29pm Happy Independent Bookstore Day! As part of its guide to Black-owned bookshops in the US, O, The Oprah Magazine created an illustrated map of some of the highlights, and it’s really delightful. The team also asked writers like Tayari Jones, Kiley Reid, and Clint Smith where they like to shop; you can

August 27, 2020, 4:11pm For the first time in more than a century, Poetry magazine will cease printing for a month, the editors announced this week. The decision comes nearly two months after the poetry community rose up in protest against the magazine and the Poetry Foundation, with dozens of prize-winning poets announcing they would

August 27, 2020, 3:29pm With this year’s Independent Bookstore Day occurring at a particularly rough time for booksellers, the iconic Powell’s Books in Portland has decided to make a statement and stop selling through Amazon. In a statement, owner Emily Powell notes that the occasion, this year, feels “especially weighty,” prompting them to take action

August 26, 2020, 12:02pm The International Booker Prize is awarded annually to the best book written in any language, translated into English, and published in the UK or Ireland. It comes with a whopping £50,000—shared equally between the author and translator. This year, the judges read 124 books in 30 languages. In a touching tribute