Poetry and magic share a curious history, since shamans and priests of ancient times would chant verses and incantations as part of their rituals designed to heal the sick, influence the weather, or appeal to the gods. So we might even say there is something peculiarly ‘magical’ about poetry. Below, we introduce ten of the
Literature
April 8, 2021, 10:41am Today, the Center for Fiction announced that after an extensive national search, Traci Lester has been named as the organization’s next Executive Director. Lester comes to the Center for Fiction from the National Dance Institute, where she served as Executive Director from 2016 until this March; Lester also spent over a
April 7, 2021, 2:31pm It’s William Wordsworth’s 251st birthday today, and we’re celebrating by taking a look at people who didn’t like him. (Why not?) For someone who had such wonder and amazement in his heart for, say, a mountain, Wordsworth was not a warm guy; he said of himself that as a child he
To be ‘between Scylla and Charybdis’ is, if you will, to be caught between a rock and a hard place – in other words, between two equally unappealing dangers or prospects. But how did the phrase come into being? What are its origins, and who on earth were Scylla and Charybdis? In the latest in
April 7, 2021, 12:35pm This morning, the brilliant Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai, Lightning Rods, and Some Trick, posted a devastating Twitter thread to which many, many people in America can, unfortunately, probably relate: DeWitt had a medical emergency in December which resulted in a bill of over $6,000. DeWitt went on to say
April 6, 2021, 5:21pm I’ve always been a fan of Tom Waits. But I was a huge fan of Tom Waits in my late teens and early twenties when his whiskey-soaked romanticism, all burnt-out and busted, was soundtrack to my fantasies of life on the down-and-out. And how did I arrive at these fantasies? By
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published in 1950, was the first of the seven Chronicles of Narnia to be published. The book became an almost instant classic, although its author, C. S. Lewis, reportedly destroyed the first draft after he received harsh criticism on it from his friends and fellow fantasy writers, including
April 6, 2021, 11:47am Craving some new Lord of the Rings-related media? While you wait for the Amazon Prime series, have a laugh and watch this 30-year-old television adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring, courtesy of Russian channel 5TV. The 1991 film aired once, never to be seen again—until now. Very much a product of
April 5, 2021, 1:32pm There’s much to celebrate at the moment: it’s spring, vaccinations are becoming widely available, Cadbury Cream Eggs are steeply discounted at Walgreen’s… But in case you’re still looking for a way to quiet your racing mind, may I recommend Oral Florist? Created (or “arranged”) by writer and translator Rita Bullwinkel and
‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’ is the title usually given to T. S. Eliot’s review of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Eliot’s short review was published in The Dial magazine in 1923, and can be read here; below, we offer a few words of analysis of this influential essay by one major modernist writer, about the work of
April 5, 2021, 10:53am N+1 has announced a new fiction prize in honor of n+1 contributor and brilliant short story writer Anthony Veasna So, who died in 2020. The newly established Anthony Veasna So Fiction Prize is an annual $5,000 award granted to a fiction writer whose work has appeared in n+1 in print or
In this episode, Andrew is joined by Tobey Pearl, the author of Terror to the Wicked, to discuss the violence, war, and oppression that shaped life in early America, as well as to share the story and impact of the first murder trial in the nation’s history. From the episode: Tobey Pearl: I certainly am
Although perhaps the most famous symbolic quality associated with the colour white is ‘purity’, this summary doesn’t take into account the complexity and ambiguity of colour symbolism when it comes to the colour white: a colour which is at once all colours and no colour. In this post, we’re going to analyse the symbolism and
Timur likes going to the cinema to see double bills of Turkish or foreign films; a romance and an adventure film, a drama and a western—it almost doesn’t matter what they show. It’s a treat, but not as much as going to Istanbul; drinking, listening to the beautiful singers and cheering on the footballers. The
Melissa Febos in her previous works has investigated herself with smart, hawk-eyed precision and dazzling prose. In Girlhood, Febos’s new essay collection, she turns her unflinching eye to the experience of coming of age in a female body. Pulling from her own memories and reflections, interspersed with those of women she interviewed, Febos reveals how
‘A Day’s Wait’ is one of Ernest Hemingway’s shortest short stories, running to just a few pages. It was published in 1927 in his collection The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. In just a few pages, ‘A Day’s Wait’ covers a number of key features of Hemingway’s work as a whole, and so despite
Despite my inclination for critical detachment, I admit there are some books I can’t help but take personally. As a person who stutters, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is one of those books. I first read the Pulitzer-winning novel my senior year of college, during which I wrote a thesis about characters who stutter. I’d compiled
During the first month of the pandemic I was afraid to write to my grandpa. I imagined the virus, bright pink but invisible, smearing the paper and the envelope and the mail carrier’s glove, and so on, all the way to my grandpa’s hand. In April I began sending him a weekly letter at the nursing home where