June 9, 2020, 4:50am Another week, another brand-new batch of books to order from one of these black-owned independent bookstores! * Sam Lansky, Broken People(Hanover Square Press) “With humor, verve, and cut-to-the-bone revelations, Lansky takes readers on an enthralling adventure.”–Publishers Weekly Jennifer Worley, Neon Girls(Harper Perennial) “A vivid and erudite exploration of class struggle and gender identity.”–Kirkus
Literature
‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’ first appeared as part of the collection Words for Music Perhaps in 1932; it is one of W. B. Yeats’s later poems and part of a series of poems featuring ‘Crazy Jane’. Before we offer some words of analysis of ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’, here’s the text
June 8, 2020, 12:18pm If you were on Twitter this weekend (and are reading this) you probably came across the #PublishingPaidMe hashtag, a place for writers to reveal what they were paid by publishers for their books. Started by author LL McKinney, #PublishingPaidMe is in some ways a response to the now ubiquitous corporate declarations
Poets, as Percy Shelley memorably said, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. For W. H. Auden, poetry ‘makes nothing happen’. What role does the poet have on the political scene? Have poets engaged memorably with their own political moment? Below, we introduce ten classic political poems – poems which are ‘political’ on a range
Memoirs of Hadrian begins in illness and distance, and with a letter. “My dear Mark,” the dying emperor writes from his villa at Tibur to his eventual heir, the adolescent he blesses as Aurelius. “I have formed a project for telling you about my life [. . .] to know myself better before I die.”
Poets have written about houses, palaces, museums, towers, churches, and much else besides. Below, we introduce ten of our favourite poems about buildings and structures of various kinds. From sacred spaces to haunted houses, these buildings feature in some of the finest poems on the subject – but are there any classic poems we’ve missed
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
Probably Robert Browning’s most famous (and widely studied) dramatic monologue, ‘My Last Duchess’ is spoken by the Duke of Ferrara, chatting away to an acquaintance (for whom we, the reader, are the stand-in) and revealing a sinister back-story lurking behind the portrait of his late wife, the Duchess, that adorns the wall. It’s easy enough
TOMORROW: In 1917, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize, is born. READINGS ON RACISM, WHITE SUPREMACY AND POLICE VIOLENCE: Aaron Robertson on George Floyd and Black pessimism · Daryl Pinckney on the American tradition of anti-Black vigilantism · Angela Davis on Black Lives Matter, Palestine, and the future of radicalism · Carol Anderson on the history of respectability politics and their failure to keep Black
Previously, we chose some of the greatest war poems; now, it’s the turn of peace. Have poets written as well about peace as they have about war? Although war poetry has provided an important service (if we can call poetry a ‘service’ as such) in bringing to light the horror, tragedy, and atrocity of warfare,
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. Today on episode 52 of The Quarantine Tapes, Paul Holdengräber is joined by author Viet Thanh Nguyen. They discuss the history
‘Hope’ is a short poem by Emily Brontë (1818-48); a poem we thought worth sharing at this time. In this poem, the author of Wuthering Heights personifies Hope, but here she is a false friend, who only seems to be interested in being with the poet if her ‘fate’ is a good one. Unlike Keats’s
June 5, 2020, 12:29pm Nancy Bass Wyden, owner of New York City’s Strand Bookstore—one of the largest independent bookstores in the country—purchased stock in Amazon three times between April 6 and May 1, totaling somewhere between $115,000 and $250,000, according to Barron’s. If you’ll recall this was a time period which saw the coronavirus pandemic
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the comic genius of Dickens in one of his less well-known novel Dombey and Son is some way from being Charles Dickens’s most popular novel. Indeed, of his fifteen full-length novels, it’s probably down there at the bottom, alongside Barnaby Rudge. The last
June 5, 2020, 12:46pm Yesterday, riding my much-cheaper-than-a-Peloton bike and bobbing to Killer Mike and El-P on Run The Jewels 4, you could say I was in a mood. On the heels of Killer Mike’s speech in response to the George Floyd protests in Atlanta, some people are already calling the newly released album the anthem
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ in 1797. The poem has a curious origin in an incident involving spilt milk; there may be no use crying over spilt milk, but there is something to be said for writing great poetry about it. ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, written in blank verse,
In the days before the virus arrived, I was falling out of love with my hometown. I’d had enough of Los Angeles and its conspicuous displays of wealth, and the public tragedy of its smoky homeless camps. I was sick of the Teslas and the exotic Porsche SUVs and the gas-guzzling Expeditions cutting me off
Although it was first performed in the 1590s, the first documented performance of Romeo and Juliet is from 1662. The diarist Samuel Pepys was in the audience, and recorded that he ‘saw “Romeo and Juliet,” the first time it was ever acted; but it is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my