In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses a poem that represents the meeting-point of ancient riddle and modern nonsense ‘I Saw a Peacock’ is an anonymous nonsense poem that is included in Quentin Blake’s The Puffin Book of Nonsense Verse (Puffin Poetry), a wonderful anthology which I’d recommend to any
Literature
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
We are two hours north of the relentless sirens, our Bronx soundscape these months. That moment where car-weary conversations border on delusional. “Mom, can we have an All-American experience when we get there? Like jumping from a rafter into a haystack?” We laugh and miss our turn. We search for a shoulder to turn around
July 2, 2020, 12:13pm Yesterday, a tweet from Liberation Library, an organization that provides books to incarcerated children (yes, you read that right), went viral. It was a photograph of thank-you letter written by a child in custody, to the organization, expressing gratitude for the books. A letter from one of our readers: “I wanted
The following is excerpted from the Georgia Review‘s Summer 2020 issue. Laura van den Berg is the author of two story collections and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel. She is the recipient of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and a PEN/O. Henry Award, and a two-time finalist for
Poets have often paid tribute to particular locations in their poetry, writing paeans to beautiful landscapes, bustling cities, or areas of historical or personal significance. Below, we introduce ten of our favourite poems about places of various kinds, in Britain, America, and elsewhere. Anonymous, ‘The Cries of London’. The author of this seventeenth-century poem about
July 1, 2020, 3:59pm When John Prine died earlier this year, there were a few things his obituary writers agreed on. If you weren’t a huge music fan, you might not have known who he was. If you knew who he was, you undoubtedly loved him. And if you really loved him, you knew that
Ever since Trump was elected, we have been living through things that we would find overplayed and unbelievable in fiction and film and they keep on coming. Sunday night they came in the form of a rich, white sixty-something couple waving deadly weapons at a St. Louis Black Lives Matter march. The casually dressed personal
Homelessness, income inequality, mass incarceration, wage stagnation, housing shortages: COVID-19 didn’t create any of these things, but it did drag them blatantly and unmistakably into the light. With millions of Americans unemployed, uninsured, unable to pay rent, and at disproportionate risk of contracting COVID-19, it’s become impossible to avoid the fact that our social safety
The following is excerpted from Destination Wedding, a novel by Diksha Basu. Basu is a writer and occasional actor. Originally from New Delhi, India, she holds a BA in Economics from Cornell University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and now divides her time between New York City and Mumbai. Mr. Das
‘Sonnet – To Science’ is one of the earliest poems written by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). Indeed, this poem was written when Poe was barely 20, in 1829! It appeared in print that year, in Poe’s second collection of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems. Although ‘Sonnet – To Science’ may appear to be a hymn
June 29, 2020, 12:44pm JK Rowling deleted praise of Stephen King on Twitter and I really want out of this timeline. Rowling’s insistence on “debating” the right of trans people to exist is exhausting and hurtful, and is perhaps best summed up here, by Gabrielle Bellot’s incredibly thoughtful and generous essay. Stephen King, after thinking
Mónica Ramón Ríos is a writer, editor, and scholar originally from Chile. Her books of fiction are Cars on Fire, Alias el Rucio, and Segundos. She contributes regularly to publications in Mexico, Chile, and the US, and her academic work focuses on the intersections of Latin American film and literature. In 2008, Ríos co-created the
TODAY: In 1957, Malcolm Lowry, author of the 1947 novel Under the Volcano, dies. Because “queerdom is vast and diverse and so are the novels,” Rabih Alameddine recommends some gay books you might not have known were gay. | Lit Hub Leigh Stein on social listening, online posturing, and the (fake) language of white capitalist
TODAY: In 1946, American artist, author, translator, and illustrator Wanda Gág, best known for writing and illustrating the children’s book Millions of Cats, the oldest American picture book still in print, dies. Letters from protests across the country: From Vermont, Major Jackson on defending that “part of Black life you don’t actually see” • Indigo
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
June 26, 2020, 9:59am If you haven’t read “The Lottery” lately, there’s never been a better time—especially if you, like me, enjoy feeling like you’re hearing your favorite dead writers weigh in on world events. Tomorrow is also the day the story’s titular lottery takes place each year, in case you need an extra nudge.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle examines the origins of an oft-misused phrase ‘Good in parts.’ ‘A mixed bag.’ This is what people generally mean when they use the phrase ‘curate’s egg’ to describe something. For instance, in book reviews: ‘A real curate’s egg, this. Parts of it are really