TODAY: In 1558, playwright Robert Greene, a man of sour temperament who, it is believed, deeply resented Shakespeare’s success, is born. Freedom means can rather than should: Gabrielle Bellot on what the Harper’s open letter gets wrong. | Lit Hub Politics “She makes the supernatural natural, the natural real and radiant.” James Lefenstey on Louise Erdrich, who salvages wisdom
Literature
July 10, 2020, 12:24pm The owners of Greenlight Bookstore, which has two Brooklyn locations, came forward this week to take responsibility for “negative experiences of Black customers and employees in our stores” with a commitment to improving. In an open letter published Wednesday, co-owners Rebecca Fitting and Jessica Stockton-Bagnulo acknowledged that Black customers and employees
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys a new lexicon of useful words for troubled times We live in strange and worrying times. If hindsight, as Billy Wilder once said, is always 20:20, then our own hindsight on 2020 will surely be dominated by widespread unrest, a global pandemic, and
Many of you have already heard the awful news that brilliant and beloved and longtime Norton author Brad Watson—who wrote with the most extraordinary and profound awareness of the beautiful and cursed human body and its frailties—died suddenly of an apparent heart attack at 64 years old. He was my first Norton author. I had
TODAY: In 1931, Alice Munro, pictured here with Marilynne Robinson at 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center in 1983, is born. “The exiled and returned of Fukushima find themselves cornered again by the pandemic.” Yu Miri’s view from the railways of Japan. | Lit Hub The rise of the feminized city: Leslie Kern on women, gentrification, and
July 9, 2020, 4:21pm It’s the audio version that I want. Wouldn’t you? Mariah Carey’s memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, is set to come out this fall. Carey herself will be reading the audiobook, which will feature occasional musical interludes. Carey’s career has had its highs and lows (let’s be honest, though, like 90% highs),
TODAY: In 1893, American journalist and radio broadcaster Dorothy Thompson is born. Freedom means can rather than should: Gabrielle Bellot on what the Harper’s open letter gets wrong. | Lit Hub Politics “Here you can feel the relief, like something ended and we survived, but it’s clear to me that nothing’s over yet.” Dolores Dorantes and Ben Ehrenreich
Slavery has been much in the news and on social media lately, so we thought we’d do something that’s long overdue here at Interesting Literature: share some of the most powerful, damning, and emotionally moving poems about slavery and the plight of African slaves over the centuries, from poets writing both in Britain and America,
July 8, 2020, 3:25pm Authors including Colson Whitehead, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., and Adam Rutherford are cancelling events at the Free Library of Philadelphia over complaints from Black employees that they have been mistreated and undervalued there. An open letter from Black employees says that “Black staff routinely experience racial discrimination, harassment, microaggressions, and other
Monuments often lie. Political elites erect them in the name of one sanctioned collective narrative or another, and they come down by violence or by decree as historical winds shift. In 1776 American patriots toppled an equestrian statue of King George. Not one of the thousands of statues of Lenin that were once all over
July 7, 2020, 5:11pm The artist’s retreat formerly known as the MacDowell Colony announced today that it would drop the “Colony” from its name going forward and be known simply as MacDowell (which is, I gather, what the cool kids have been calling it for years, anyway). Nell Painter, MacDowell’s board chair, said the decision
The following story is excerpted from Last One Out Shut Off the Lights by Stephanie Soileau. Soileau‘s fiction has appeared in Tin House, Oxford American, and Glimmer Train, among other magazines, and has been reprinted numerous times in New Stories from the South. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been
‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’ is one of Robert Browning’s most celebrated dramatic monologues: it first appeared in Browning’s 1842 collection Dramatic Lyrics. As ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’ is a relatively long poem, perhaps the best way to offer an analysis of the poem is by going through it, stanza by stanza, and analysing
The following is excerpted from from Daphne Merkin’s new novel, 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love. Merkin is the author of the novel Enchantment, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for best novel on a Jewish theme, as well as two collections of essays, and a memoir, This Close to Happy. A former staff writer
Hosted by Paul Holdengräber, The Quarantine Tapes chronicles shifting paradigms in the age of social distancing. Each day, Paul calls a guest for a brief discussion about how they are experiencing the global pandemic. For Mona Eltahawy, one of the biggest lessons she learned from her activism in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution is that the
TODAY: In 1855, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is published. Dispatches from writers in America: Tracy K. Smith’s letter to Black America • From Newark Nyle Fort writes to his nephew about trauma and uprising. | Lit Hub Chrome-plated pistols and pink polos: Rebecca Solnit on the face of elite panic in the USA. | Lit
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
The author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World, and Eileen, joins Books & Books’ events coordinator, Cristina Nosti, for a virtual conversation on bookstores, craft, isolation, film, humor, art, love and death. Moshfegh talks in-depth and reads from her latest novel of haunting, metaphysical suspense, Death In Her Hands, about