July 27, 2020, 7:30pm This year’s Booker Prize longlist includes some books you expected—and also quite a few books you didn’t, including eight (8) debuts out of the thirteen books. “It is an unusually high proportion, and especially surprising to the judges themselves, who had admired many books by more established authors, and regretted having
Literature
‘may i feel said he’ is one of E. E. Cummings’ most playful poems, detailing the to-and-fro between a man and a woman engaged in a fling (the man’s wife is mentioned, so the female speaker here must be his mistress). It’s one of Cummings’ more straightforward and easily comprehensible poems; nevertheless, some words of
July 27, 2020, 10:14am What are you up to this summer? Planning an excursion to the woods? Kicking back with some good television and a beer? Alternatively, why don’t you come along with me for the ultimate socially-distanced leisure activity for our times: poring over these cool maps of New York City and the surrounding
July 24, 2020, 11:07am Siobhan Reardon, president and director of the Philadelphia Free Library, has resigned under protracted pressure from local officials and staff over accusations that she created an unwelcome and hostile environment for black employees. “In the last several months, events have overtaken us all,” Pam Dembe, chairperson for the library’s board of
July 24, 2020, 11:32am If you watched the excellent HBO documentary last year about the Apollo Theater in New York City, you would have seen a moving, behind-the-scenes segment about Kamilah Forbes’s 2018 stage adaptation of her friend Ta-Nehisi Coates’ celebrated book, Between the World and Me. The book, partly inspired by James Baldwin’s The Fire Next
July 24, 2020, 11:34am As any and all Philip Pullman stans will undoubtedly already be aware, HBO just released the trailer for the second season of the latest adaptation of His Dark Materials, which features noted hot priest Andrew Scott, who will be portraying Colonel John Parry. And because time is a flat circle and
TODAY: In 1834, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge dies. Yoko Ogawa, Masatsugu Ono, and more Japanese authors discuss their favorite Murakami short stories. | Lit Hub “For decades I joked that home was somewhere around 33,000 feet. No more.” Samiya Bashir returns from Rome to an uncertain America. | Lit Hub Politics “Our disappointment with the
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys a new translation of the classic fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm Snow White, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, and Rumpelstiltskin: these names are among those we meet during our earliest years, with the stories they summon never leaving our psyches. Others are better-known
July 24, 2020, 12:04pm Lana Del Rey is releasing her forthcoming poetry collection, Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass, on Tuesday, July 28 in digital form. In case you prefer your celebrity poetry spoken aloud, though, she has also recorded an audio version of the book, which will be released on vinyl, CD, cassette, and
The following is excerpted from “The Corridor”, a short story by Ryan Eric Dull, originally published in The New England Review. Dull lives in Southern California. His work has appeared in the Missouri Review and the Pushcart Prize Anthology and is upcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Alex Greer was ready for a change. His job
King Lear is one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies; indeed, some critics have considered it the greatest. It is certainly one of the bleakest. The plot and subplot deftly weave together the principal themes of the play, which include reason, madness, blindness of various kinds, and – perhaps most crucially of all – the relationship between
This is episode four of the Virtual Franklin Park Reading Series, hosted by Marae Hart. This episode is a showcase of new fiction by acclaimed writers Blake Butler, author of Alice Knott, Tracy O’Neill, author of Quotients, Maisy Card, author of These Ghosts Are Family, and Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, Sleepovers. The Virtual Franklin Park Reading
TODAY: In 1948, S. E. Hinton, best known for her young-adult novels set in Oklahoma, including The Outsiders, which she wrote during high school, is born. “If the pandemic were a war, then we are losing it, if it isn’t lost already.” Siri Hustvedt, in contemplation of a photograph by Rachel Cobb, on what the world
July 21, 2020, 4:08pm It is a truth universally acknowledged that vampires make for the best entertainment content. They do, they just do, and they always have. In the latest news about humankind’s obsession with vampires, Aimee Ortiz reports in The New York Times that an auction house in England is accepting bids on a nineteenth-century
TODAY: In 1664, English poet and diplomat Matthew Prior takes his birthday as an opportunity to chastise the woman he loves for treating him with ‘scorn’ and denying him via a poem, “On My Birthday, July 21.” “We conjure a world that is worthy of us. And then we gather there: unbowed, unburied, unabashed in
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), wrote ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ in 1816 during the same holiday at Lake Geneva that produced the novel Frankenstein (written, of course, by Percy’s wife, Mary Shelley). Below, we offer a summary and analysis of ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, stanza by stanza. Hymn to Intellectual Beauty The awful shadow of some
July 20, 2020, 4:21pm Today in adaptation news: Neflix has won the rights to adapt Rumaan Alam’s forthcoming novel Leave the World Behind, with Sam Esmail—of Mr Robot and Homecoming fame—directing, and Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington starring. In the novel, an unspecified global catastrophe wipes out all forms of electronic communication with the outside
TODAY: In 1945, French author and poet Paul Valéry, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years, dies. “If I’m not willing to spend a few days journeying somewhere for something, it means it’s too far for that particular purpose.” Lydia Davis on the decision to not fly. | Lit