Damian Barr’s Literary Salon tempts the world’s best writers to read exclusively from their latest greatest works and share their own personal stories. Star guests include Jojo Moyes, John Waters, Yaa Gyasi, Mary Beard, Diana Athill and Louis de Bernières—all in front of a live audience at leading glamorous locations world-wide. Our London home is
Literature
Juneteenth commemorates the June 19, 1865 arrival of Union troops in Galveston, Texas—over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation—who brought with them official news of the end of slavery in the United States. Long a day of celebration of Black life and family in America, Juneteenth should become a national holiday not so the whole
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle ponders the significance of the humble toothbrush in modern poetry ‘As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can’t put toothbrushes in a poem, I really can’t!’ Sylvia Plath’s statement – made in a 1962
I was in the car with my mother earlier this week when the CFO at her company called. She groaned and put him on speaker. Before I got out to walk into a store, the executive said, “Cindy, I wanted to ask you about that Juneteenth email…” My mother and I are African-American. You can
The diarist Samuel Pepys wasn’t a fan of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Seeing a performance of the play in 1662, he wrote in his diary that it was ‘the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life’ (though he adds that he liked the dancing, as well as the ‘handsome women’
June 18, 2020, 2:44pm After spending the week getting destroyed by Gen Z on TikTok, here’s some good news for millennials: every 90s kid’s favorite portmanteau-titled book series is finally(?) getting a film adaptation. For the unacquainted(/Irish), the Animorphs were a scrappy gang of teens who, according to Wikipedia (because I could not remember, sorry),
‘The Kind Ghosts’ is not one of Wilfred Owen’s best-known war poems, but it deserves to be better-known. In just twelve lines, Owen (1893-1918) contrasts the sleepy attitude of Britain’s civilians with the sacrifice being made by countless British men in the theatre of war. Owen revised ‘The Kind Ghosts’ in July 1918, just a
June 18, 2020, 10:44am Practical Magic just may be the best movie of all time. Every time the leaves get crisp and the jack o’lanterns come out, I put on that sweet ’90s soundtrack. (Okay, it’s on right now and Stevie Nicks is singing “If You Ever Did Believe.”) I watch it multiple times a
If one were to compile a list of the most outrageous, scandalous, and provocative poets in all of English literature, one name would have to lead all the rest: John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647-80). His colourful private (and public) life at the court of King Charles II was dramatised in the film The
June 17, 2020, 12:30pm The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) has announced the finalists for the sixth annual Firecracker Awards, which honor the best independently published fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Mark your calendars: the winners will be announced on June 30th. * FICTION Flowers of Mold by Ha Seong-nan, translated by Janet
‘Perfect Woman’, sometimes known by its first line, ‘She was a phantom of delight’, is a poem William Wordsworth (1770-1850) wrote in 1804 about his wife, Mary Hutchinson. The poem is a classic example of uxorious poetry – poetry written about the love for a wife – and although its meaning is fairly straightforward, a
June 17, 2020, 12:57pm The Room Where It Happened, John Bolton’s memoir of his time in the Trump administration, is the #1 bestseller on Amazon in advance of its release on June 23, even as the government has sued to slow its publication. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, claims that Bolton did not fully cooperate with the
‘The Imp of the Perverse’ is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), written in 1845. Of all of Poe’s stories, this is one of the strongest tales to prefigure the ideas of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Before we proceed to a summary and analysis of this story, it might be worth
June 16, 2020, 4:04pm Oprah Winfrey announced today that her next book club selection would be Deacon King Kong by James McBride, a novel that she says resonates at a time when America is facing a reckoning over race and violence against black people. “In a moment when our country roils with righteous anger and
‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’ (1946) is one of Wallace Stevens’s finest later poems. In just sixteen lines and eight couplets, Stevens summons the quiet and calm of solitary reading inside a house. You can read ‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’ here before proceeding to our analysis
June 16, 2020, 1:43pm The brilliant Bernadine Evaristo—a longtime advocate for writers and artists of color whose most recent novel Girl, Woman, Other took home last year’s Booker Prize—appeared on the BBC’s topical debate show Question Time last week to talk about the welcome wave of racist statue removal that’s has been sweeping Britain in recent weeks.
Its title echoing the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, ‘The Unknown Citizen’ is a poem that demonstrates W. H. Auden’s fine ability to fuse irony and wit with pathos and pity. Written in 1939, the poem was one of the first Auden wrote after he moved from Britain to the United States. You can read
From King Arthur to Queen Elizabeth II, monarchs have often been eulogised and discussed in verse down the centuries. Both fictional kings and queens, and very real rulers, have been commemorated (and occasionally mocked) in English poetry since at least the days of Anglo-Saxon verse. In this post, we gather together, and introduce, some of