‘The Last Laugh’ is a poem by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), drafted in February 1918 (as ‘Last Words’) but only first published after Owen’s death in November 1918, one week before the Armistice. Although not his most famous poem by any means, ‘The Last Laugh’ is one of his most stark and direct. Before we move
Literature
How To Proceed is a bi-monthly conversation about writing, creativity and the world we live in. Author Linn Ullmann talks to some of the world’s most exciting literary voices about their books, their writing process, and how they view the world and current events around them. On today’s podcast, Linn Ullmann talks to Terrance Hayes,
It seems that “Waiting For Adam: Interviews and Obsessions” by entertainment journalist Eileen Shapiro is the fun read of the summer! With glamorous pictures galore and behind the scenes secrets New Haven Publishing knew just what they were doing. The book is a light-hearted journey from star to star and country to country until Shapiro
The biggest publicist to have ever walked the face of this earth, Howard Bloom has recently released a culmination of his extraordinary experiences with those he represented in “Einstein, Michael Jackson and Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll.” The question is who didn’t he embody? The list of
Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. His previous books include the poetry collections Middle Earth, Blackbird and Wolf, Touch, and Pierce the Skin, as well as a memoir, Orphic Paris. He has received many awards for his work, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall
TODAY: In 1919, F. Scott Fitzgerald gives the manuscript of This Side of Paradise to his friend Shane Leslie to deliver to Maxwell Perkins, editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York. “My correspondence with loved ones, and particularly fellow artists, are what has kept me aloft in recent months in this era of
September 4, 2020, 10:07am As the election nears and House Democrats continue to spar with USPS Postmaster General Louis Dejoy, one could be forgiven for feeling anxious about the mail. On Monday, the UCLA Voting Rights Project published a report on the need to build trust among Americans in the vote-by-mail process. Although the president’s
TODAY: In 1921, The Cervantes Theatre in Buenos Aires opens with a production of Lope de Vega’s La dama boba. “He died a terrible death, his chest working overtime like he often did in the mill.” Kerri Arsenault on life and death in a Maine mill town. | Lit Hub Memoir She hoped that children who played her
September 4, 2020, 10:14am I love old Volkswagen vans and I love bookstores and because it’s Friday I also love feel good stories (I also love hardworking local newspaper headlines, but that’s another story). So that’s why I’m bringing your attention to the story of Melanie Moore, who at the very last second—the night before
September 4, 2020, 12:26pm Izumi Suzuki, whose works of science fiction have earned her a special place in Japanese counterculture, will soon make her English-language debut with a story collection whose synopsis sounds almost unbearably cool. Verso Books will publish Terminal Boredom, a short story collection, in April 2021, and another collection titled Love<Death the
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses an early Tennyson poem Who invented ‘free verse’? Walt Whitman (1819-92) often gets the credit, although his decision to write in free verse – unrhymed poetry without a regular metre or rhythm – may have been influenced by the Biblical Psalms. Before Whitman,
My favorite activity, my only faithful daily ritual, is to check the mail. My husband pokes fun, but whenever I’m not traveling he lovingly leaves the task to me. These days, it goes without saying, I’m always home. And while time has become a confounding concept of late (What day is it? How many weeks
September 3, 2020, 3:31pm If you want to understand the deep well of creativity author Ursula K. Le Guin drew from at a young age, you should probably start at home. Le Guin, the California-born author known for her Earthsea fantasy series and novels like The Left Hand of Darkness, thought fondly of her childhood home in Berkeley,
There are two types of women, Picasso said: “goddesses and doormats.” His ideal muse—helpmeet and source of creative inspiration—was a hybrid; decorative enough to hold the artist’s eye, and meek enough, as patient unpaid model, to maintain whatever pose he required of her without complaint. Ideally, she should be a biddable lover and accept that
Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle George Orwell (1903-50), born Eric Arthur Blair, is one of the most important writers of the first half of the twentieth century, and his essays and novels have continued to influence many journalists and writers since his death. The term ‘Orwellian’ has entered the dictionary, and many terms he coined
September 2, 2020, 3:56pm When Charles Andrew was a boy in Monroeville, a city in Alabama that today numbers under 6,000 residents, he used to watch the 1962 film adaption of To Kill a Mockingbird in the town’s segregated, single-screen theater. “It didn’t strike me that we were sitting in the Black section of the theater,” Andrew
I’ve been playing Monopoly with J every evening for a week and I haven’t won a single game. J plays with abandon, buys indiscriminately, and wins repeatedly. Tonight he’s thrown a suspicious number of doubles, so I accuse him of cheating. He’s not cheating, he explains to me happily, he’s just a lucky person. The
September 1, 2020, 2:45pm Congratulations to Ethan Hawke, star of my favorite film (Gattaca) and arguably the most bookish man in Hollywood, who has, with today’s inclusion in the (web) pages of the New York Times Book Review, completed his Literary World Bingo Card! What is the Literary World Bingo Card you ask? Well, let