July 31, 2020, 10:19am Days after Tsitsi Dangarembga was longlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize for her novel This Mournable Body, Zimbabwean officials have taken her into custody during protests against government corruption. Agence France-Presse reported that Dangarembga and another protester were “bundled into a truck full of police armed with AK-47 rifles and riot
Literature
July 30, 2020, 3:54pm If you tuned into yesterday’s historic House Judiciary Subcommittee antitrust hearing, during which the top executives of some of the world’s largest tech companies tried convincing politicians that they weren’t monopolies, you may have heard a bookseller chime in during Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s questioning. Unfortunately for companies like Google, Amazon,
July 30, 2020, 10:22am Today, W.W. Norton announced that they would be publishing Blake Bailey’s highly anticipated biography of Philip Roth on April 6, 2021. “Its 880 pages,” Hillel Italie writes, are the finished result of an undertaking that pre-dates not just Roth’s death in 2018, at age 85, but Roth’s retirement from public writing
July 29, 2020, 3:48pm Here are some facts about “Sinkhole,” a short story by Leyna Krow, author of I’m Fine, But You Appear to be Sinking: 1. It is 1,586 words long. 2. It was acquired by Universal Pictures and Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions in a competitive bidding process for “a low-seven-figure[s].” 3. This means
The finest poems by Marianne Moore Marianne Moore (1887-1972) was one of the most distinctive and accomplished modernist poets of the twentieth century. Along with William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, she stands as the greatest American modernist – of those poets who remained in America (others, such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and
TODAY: In 1628, The King’s Men perform Henry VIII at the Globe Theatre, London. George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham is in the audience, but leaves after watching the play’s Duke of Buckingham beheaded. The character is based on the historical Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, who had been executed for treason in 1521.
July 28, 2020, 1:06pm Have you ever dreamed of being immortalized within the pages of a James Patterson novel? Of living on, long after your bones have turned to dust and your headstone has been weathered into illegibility, as a firecracker love interest or industrious D.C. serial killer? Of course you have. Who amongst us
July 28, 2020, 10:31am Substack, the (apparently pretty well-funded) newsletter distribution company, has announced its second round of fellows, led by novelist and essayist Kaitlyn Greenidge. Greenidge is the only Senior Fellow of the ten, a title that carries with it a $100,000 grant. Her newsletter, Kaitlyn, will feature “cultural criticism that is entirely unchained
July 27, 2020, 7:30pm This year’s Booker Prize longlist includes some books you expected—and also quite a few books you didn’t, including eight (8) debuts out of the thirteen books. “It is an unusually high proportion, and especially surprising to the judges themselves, who had admired many books by more established authors, and regretted having
‘may i feel said he’ is one of E. E. Cummings’ most playful poems, detailing the to-and-fro between a man and a woman engaged in a fling (the man’s wife is mentioned, so the female speaker here must be his mistress). It’s one of Cummings’ more straightforward and easily comprehensible poems; nevertheless, some words of
July 27, 2020, 10:14am What are you up to this summer? Planning an excursion to the woods? Kicking back with some good television and a beer? Alternatively, why don’t you come along with me for the ultimate socially-distanced leisure activity for our times: poring over these cool maps of New York City and the surrounding
July 24, 2020, 11:07am Siobhan Reardon, president and director of the Philadelphia Free Library, has resigned under protracted pressure from local officials and staff over accusations that she created an unwelcome and hostile environment for black employees. “In the last several months, events have overtaken us all,” Pam Dembe, chairperson for the library’s board of
July 24, 2020, 11:32am If you watched the excellent HBO documentary last year about the Apollo Theater in New York City, you would have seen a moving, behind-the-scenes segment about Kamilah Forbes’s 2018 stage adaptation of her friend Ta-Nehisi Coates’ celebrated book, Between the World and Me. The book, partly inspired by James Baldwin’s The Fire Next
July 24, 2020, 11:34am As any and all Philip Pullman stans will undoubtedly already be aware, HBO just released the trailer for the second season of the latest adaptation of His Dark Materials, which features noted hot priest Andrew Scott, who will be portraying Colonel John Parry. And because time is a flat circle and
TODAY: In 1834, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge dies. Yoko Ogawa, Masatsugu Ono, and more Japanese authors discuss their favorite Murakami short stories. | Lit Hub “For decades I joked that home was somewhere around 33,000 feet. No more.” Samiya Bashir returns from Rome to an uncertain America. | Lit Hub Politics “Our disappointment with the
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys a new translation of the classic fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm Snow White, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, and Rumpelstiltskin: these names are among those we meet during our earliest years, with the stories they summon never leaving our psyches. Others are better-known
July 24, 2020, 12:04pm Lana Del Rey is releasing her forthcoming poetry collection, Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass, on Tuesday, July 28 in digital form. In case you prefer your celebrity poetry spoken aloud, though, she has also recorded an audio version of the book, which will be released on vinyl, CD, cassette, and
The following is excerpted from “The Corridor”, a short story by Ryan Eric Dull, originally published in The New England Review. Dull lives in Southern California. His work has appeared in the Missouri Review and the Pushcart Prize Anthology and is upcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Alex Greer was ready for a change. His job