Literature

From Greek mythology to modern horror and fantasy, literature is full of fantastic beasts and terrifying monsters. What makes a great fictional monster? Terror, unpredictability, and perhaps an unsettling commingling of the familiar with the unfamiliar? These qualities can all help to create a truly scary monster which haunts our dreams, even though we know

TODAY: In 1944, W.G. Sebald is born. “A chorus of voices have warned that a catastrophe such as the one that we are now living through loomed on the horizon”: Mike Davis on the inevitably of a pandemic. | Lit Hub If you’re not already rereading your favorite books all the time, Natalie Jenner recommends

‘Ode to the West Wind’ is one of the best-known and best-loved poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). It is a quintessential Romantic poem. But what does it mean? Its closing words are well-known and often quoted, but how does the rest of the poem build towards them? The best way to go about offering

Ryan Chapman hosts Nerd Jeopardy, the online literary game show. Tonight Ryan is joined by Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things, and Katie Whittemore, translator of Sara Mesa’s Four by Four. This week’s indie bookstore spotlight is on Magers & Quinn. Sign up for next week, May 20, with guests Tracy O’Neill and Matt Gallagher. *

The Middle Ages, especially the period from the Norman Conquest of 1066 in England until the Renaissance in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, has been popular in fiction at least since Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott’s hugely influential historical novel from 1819. Below, we introduce ten of our favourite novels, from over two centuries

May 15, 2020, 1:05pm Most of my friends were very disappointed when, on their eleventh birthdays, they received no letter from Hogwarts. Me? I was always more of a Lightning Thief kind of girl. (Don’t @ me!) To all my fellow Percy Jackson fans who were similarly upset that a Fury never attacked them on a

‘Success Is Counted Sweetest’ is not as famous as some of Emily Dickinson’s other poems, but she was a prolific poet, and this one is well worth reading. Indeed, it has a peculiar place in Dickinson’s oeuvre, being one of just seven poems which were published during her lifetime. (It’s not quite true that Dickinson

TODAY: In 1933  Joseph Stalin orders the NKVD to “preserve but isolate” Osip Mandelstam, after having been informed of the “Stalin Epigram”; Mandelstam is then arrested. A protest by literary figures, including Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, prompts Stalin to declare that he might “review the case” (he never will).  Because not everyone has extra

May 15, 2020, 2:30pm “I resisted. I would not die. I could not.” Katherine Anne Porter—the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author of Ship of Fools and Pale Horse, Pale Rider—was born 130 years ago today in Indian Creek, Texas, and should, by all expectations, have died less than twenty-eight years later alongside 675,000 of

‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ (1934) is one of Wallace Stevens’s finest nature poems, but it is also a celebration of the transformative power of art. But there’s a little more to the poem than this glib summary suggests. You can read ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ here before proceeding to

Hans Christian Andersen’s influence on the fairy tale genre was profound. Although ‘The Snow Queen’, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, ‘The Little Mermaid’, and ‘The Ugly Duckling’ have the ring of timeless fairy stories, they were all original tales written by the Danish storyteller in the mid-nineteenth century. First published in 1843, ‘The Ugly Duckling’ is

‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ is one of the most famous poems by the American poet, Walt Whitman (1819-92). Across 206 lines of innovative free verse, Whitman offers an elegy for Abraham Lincoln, who had been assassinated shortly before Whitman wrote the poem. You can read ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle looks at a common line associated with Helen of Troy Who said, ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’ Most people know it was Doctor Faustus. Or rather, Christopher Marlowe, who gives Doctor Faustus these words in his play about the magician

At the beginning of our now apparently unending isolation, we put out a call asking that those of you who need something good to read in this trying, frightening time, might send us a few of your favorite books (and other things) so we could recommend a good book for you to read. And turns out quite

One night recently I was talking online with my friend Peter, a GP in Edinburgh where we both live, about how he had found working during the pandemic. Peter loves poetry (he even teaches his medical students by giving them poems) and his thoughts had been running in this direction. In particular, it was metaphors—military

There’s a reason why Louisa May Alcott had Amy March burn Jo’s story. Amy could have torn her sister’s pages into pieces, or just thrown them away, but it wouldn’t have been the same. My wife tells me that I shuddered in my cinema seat at the manuscript burning scene when we watched Little Women.

TODAY: In 1890, Katherine Anne Porter is born. We’re on round eight of our personalized quarantine book recommendations, and we’re not even tired (okay, we’re a little tired). | Lit Hub “From today’s standpoint there was no financial incentive for Sesame Street’s founding duo to do what they did.” David Kamp on the radical creators of an iconic