August 18, 2020, 12:03pm Organizations representing bookstores, writers, and publishers sent a joint letter to the House Antitrust Subcommittee yesterday asking them to put a stop to Amazon’s “unhealthy degree of control” over the the marketplace for books. Addressing Congressman David Cicilline (D-RI), the current chair of a subcommittee whose work “has been critical to
Literature
TODAY: In 1946, Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men is published by Harcourt Press. Must every nation have its own Sylvia Plath? Rhian Sassen on the inescapability of Plath for writers the world over. | Lit Hub Darin Strauss on finding catharsis—and inspiration—in the story of a family betrayal. | Lit Hub Craft
‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ is one of William Wordsworth’s best-known and best-loved poems. You can read ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ here before proceeding to the summary and analysis below. Perhaps the best way to offer an analysis of this long poem is to go through it, section by section. So
August 17, 2020, 10:37am Listen, guys: we may all love Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell series—lord knows the Booker Prize judges do—but Mantel has had enough of the genre for now (and after almost 2000 pages, who could blame her?). So stop bugging her about it, okay? “I haven’t got another big historical novel in view,”
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
On August 14th, PBS is running an encore national broadcast of the Public Theater’s Much Ado About Nothing from last summer. It features an all-Black cast in New York City’s Central Park doing Shakespeare’s romantic comedy under a Stacey Abrams 2020 banner—starring Danielle Brooks and Grantham Coleman, directed by Kenny Leon. This American resetting radically changes
When I was about fourteen, I wanted to learn to type, so I got hold of a typing manual that explained where to position your fingers and included a number of typing exercises—short (and then longer) sentences that required your fingers to reach every corner of the keyboard. My mother had an old manual typewriter
TODAY: In 2007, former historian at the church where Edgar Allan Poe is buried, Sam Porpora, makes an unconfirmed claim to be the original Poe Toaster. The Poe Toaster was a mysterious figure who made a toast of cognac and left three red roses on Poe’s grave every January 19th, up until 2009. The most iconic short stories in
TODAY: In 1969, editor, publisher, and husband of Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, dies. “If fiction has the power to show us another individual’s private and interior uniqueness, then why not depict animals possessing such interiority?” Kathleen Rooney on some of her favorite non-human narrators. | Lit Hub Criticism The intentional visual chaos of Beyoncé and
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a new treasury of 1,000 Scottish words from Robin A. Crawford A clishmaclaver is a Scottish word meaning ‘the passing on of idle gossip, sometimes in a book’. A collieshangle denotes a row or fight in which two people bark at each other.
August 14, 2020, 1:31pm Every year, Longwood University’s John Dos Passos Prize sets out to celebrate one vital but under-appreciated writer. Previous recipients include Colson Whitehead, Tom Wolfe, and Annie Proulx. (Obviously, they were awarded the Dos Passos Prize before they won, say, two Pulitzer Prizes.) This year’s finalists were announced today. “These finalists represent everything
August 13, 2020, 1:47pm The Women’s Prize for Fiction recently debuted an upcoming project which will mark the 25th anniversary of the prize: an initiative called “Reclaim Her Name” (#ReclaimHerName) which republishes famous works by twenty-five female authors who published under male nom-de-plumes in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including George Eliot, George Sand,
Currently the most brilliant human on the planet, (not just my opinion, but utter fact), Howard Bloom recently released a glorious masterpiece entitled, “Einstein, Michael Jackson, and Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll.” A modern day prophet and Messiah, Bloom has been called the “next in a lineage
Is it possible that everything we think we know about God, and what God wants, is wrong? Could humanity’s ideas about all this be the greatest inaccuracies . . . ever? Would it matter if they were? The author of the multi-million-selling Conversations with God series places the question squarely before our world in another blockbuster book
Three girls…. Three dead bodies…. The quiet town of Craven Falls is depleting in population. One by one…. Scarlet Fitzgerald thought it would be fun to play a game on Laura Stevenson, a nobody at Craven Falls High. But what happens when the game unleashes buried secrets Scarlet doesn’t want anyone to know? Secrets that
August 13, 2020, 12:28pm There’s nothing I love more than a demonic preacher. Whether it’s murderous Robert Mitchum singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” as he stalks children through the friscalating West Virginia dusklight in Night of the Hunter, or supernatural misogynist Nathan Fillion spouting quasi-biblical quotes as he picks off potential Slayers in Buffy,
August 12, 2020, 3:56pm Timing is everything, but during the pandemic, it largely hasn’t been on the side of businesses. So I was recently surprised to see The Strand, whose iconic storefront in Union Square attracts thousands of visitors a year, opening a new branch in my neighborhood last month—and in a space where, just
The Castle of Otranto, often called the first Gothic novel, was published in 1764. Its author, Horace Walpole, was a fascinating man (of whom more below), but so is his most enduring work of fiction. Below, we offer a summary and analysis of The Castle of Otranto, and debunk some myths about this classic work