August 21, 2020, 11:15am By now, the events of Oscar Wilde’s 1882 speaking tour, which formally introduced him and his ideas to the US, are thoroughly mythologized: the unintended laughter he received at his first lecture in New York City, his visit with Walt Whitman, his oft-quoted statement to customs, “I have nothing to declare…
Literature
TODAY: In 1893, Dorothy Parker is born. “An honest photograph can be turned into almost anything by a misleading caption.” Rebecca Solnit on Twitter conspiracies, QAnon, and the case of the two-faced mailboxes. | Lit Hub Why do most movies suck? Ted Hope, film executive, contemplates mediocrity. | Lit Hub Film Must every nation have its own Sylvia Plath? Rhian Sasseen on the inescapability of Plath for writers
August 21, 2020, 11:57am Three competing design proposals are out for the forthcoming Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, a city of 112 people that sits on the southern border of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The finalists—Snøhetta, Studio Gang, and Henning Larsen—all released designs that incorporate the area’s natural landscape. Snøhetta’s design, shown
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the interesting theatrical origins of a famous phrase What does it mean to ‘steal one’s thunder’? The phrase is well-known, but its origins are less so. And to delve into the history of this now common phrase, we need to go into the
August 21, 2020, 12:09pm Lucy Ellmann, author of Ducks, Newburyport, one of the biggest books (in every sense) to come out in 2019, won this year’s James Tait Black Prize in fiction. It is among the oldest literary awards in the UK, which Ellmann’s father, Richard, won in 1982 for his biography of James Joyce. Ducks,
August 20, 2020, 2:59pm The Huntington Library, part of a beautiful complex with an art museum and botanical garden in San Marino, California, turns 100 this year and they’ve found a great way to celebrate. The library announced a one-year fellowship that will fund the study of Pasadena native Octavia Butler’s work. The only catch
August 20, 2020, 12:46pm Apparently Spotify is looking for someone to run an audiobooks division, per this very thorough analysis by Mark Williams at The New Publishing Standard. With 299 million monthly users, that could actually be a pretty huge deal for a sector of publishing that’s absolutely dominated by Amazon (aka Audible). I highly
August 19, 2020, 2:55pm An open letter published today and signed by 30 members of the National Book Critics Circle calls for sweeping changes to the organization’s structure and practices, with a specific set of recommendations meant to address inclusion, accessibility, and anti-racism. The letter advocated for adding more Black voices to the board and
Othello is one of Shakespeare’s five best-known and widely studied tragedies, along with Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet. But as is so often with a well-known text, we don’t know this one nearly as well as we think we do: Othello has more in it than jealousy, the ‘green-eyed monster’, and (implied)
August 19, 2020, 1:14pm Ah, yes, the good old days: when novelists lent their faces and testimonials to advertisers hoping to sell tires, or a certain kind of beer, or fancy watches. It’s something you don’t see very much anymore, because we writers have become too principled to participate in advertising campaigns. Just kidding: it’s
August 18, 2020, 11:07am Today marks the 62nd anniversary of the American publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s most controversial and iconic work. Lolita—the story of a verbose, middle-aged literature professor, sexually obsessed with pre-pubescent girls, and his perverse and destructive relationship with 12-year-old Dolores Haze—became a near-instant bestseller in the US, shifting over 100,000 copies in
August 18, 2020, 12:03pm Organizations representing bookstores, writers, and publishers sent a joint letter to the House Antitrust Subcommittee yesterday asking them to put a stop to Amazon’s “unhealthy degree of control” over the the marketplace for books. Addressing Congressman David Cicilline (D-RI), the current chair of a subcommittee whose work “has been critical to
TODAY: In 1946, Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men is published by Harcourt Press. Must every nation have its own Sylvia Plath? Rhian Sassen on the inescapability of Plath for writers the world over. | Lit Hub Darin Strauss on finding catharsis—and inspiration—in the story of a family betrayal. | Lit Hub Craft
‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ is one of William Wordsworth’s best-known and best-loved poems. You can read ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ here before proceeding to the summary and analysis below. Perhaps the best way to offer an analysis of this long poem is to go through it, section by section. So
August 17, 2020, 10:37am Listen, guys: we may all love Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell series—lord knows the Booker Prize judges do—but Mantel has had enough of the genre for now (and after almost 2000 pages, who could blame her?). So stop bugging her about it, okay? “I haven’t got another big historical novel in view,”
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
On August 14th, PBS is running an encore national broadcast of the Public Theater’s Much Ado About Nothing from last summer. It features an all-Black cast in New York City’s Central Park doing Shakespeare’s romantic comedy under a Stacey Abrams 2020 banner—starring Danielle Brooks and Grantham Coleman, directed by Kenny Leon. This American resetting radically changes
When I was about fourteen, I wanted to learn to type, so I got hold of a typing manual that explained where to position your fingers and included a number of typing exercises—short (and then longer) sentences that required your fingers to reach every corner of the keyboard. My mother had an old manual typewriter