May 21, 2020, 9:30am Bookselling is tricky business: Some months are good, some months are bad, and sometimes, you’re hit with unexpected demand for the novels of an accused murderess and charlatan who became the talk of the town for possibly shooting her husband and holding satanic rituals. There’s a lot going on in this
Literature
‘September 1913’ is a poem by W. B. Yeats (1865-1939). It describes Ireland in the month of September 1913, as the title suggests, and sees Yeats lamenting the condition of Ireland at that time. Before we offer an analysis of the poem, here’s a reminder of the text of ‘September 1913’. September 1913 What need
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
What is an epigraph? And what is the difference between an epigraph, an epitaph, and an epigram? We’re here to define the epigraph and differentiate it from its near-homophonous neighbours in the dictionary. So, before we launch into a full introduction to the epigraph and its usefulness for writers, let’s distinguish between epigraph, epitaph, and
TODAY: In 1882, Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928, is born. “For such an anti-intellectual, Malaparte is extraordinarily intelligent.” Edmund White on reading Curzio Malaparte, eccentric, writer, liar, fascist. | Lit Hub Great plagues always hit workers the hardest: on Daniel Defoe’s fictional account of the London plague.
‘The More Loving One’ is one of W. H. Auden’s most popular post-1930s poems. At once a celebration of unrequited love and a metaphysical poem about the difficulty of finding ‘love’ and meaning in a secular age, it is a straightforward poem that, like much of Auden’s poetry, conceals more complex meanings beneath the surface.
This is episode nine of The Antibody Reading Series, a weekly reading and Q and A hosted by Brian Gresko. [embedded content] Tonights guests are Laura Van Den Berg, Melissa Febos, and Tracy O’Neill. You can buy their books from The Antibody‘s local indie, Greenlight Bookstore or from Bookshop: Laura Van Den Berg, I Hold a Wolf by
After ‘The Raven’, which is undoubtedly Poe’s most popular poem, ‘Annabel Lee’ is perhaps his next best-known and admired. ‘Annabel Lee’ has been called ‘the simplest and sweetest of [Edgar Allan Poe’s] ballads’ (by Poe’s biographer, George Edward Woodberry), but how ‘simple’ the poem is remains to be seen. Is it a ballad, or narrative
TODAY: In 1930, Lorraine Hansberry born, the first African-American woman to have a play performed on Broadway, is born. Even in retirement, Philip Roth wrote thousands of pages: Benjamin Taylor on stoicism and scandal in the life of a literary icon. | Lit Hub “It is the job of the poet to bring forth the heart’s
The ‘nineteenth-century novel’ covers Jane Austen’s Regency fiction, the comic exuberance of Dickens, the social critiques of Elizabeth Gaskell, the realism of George Eliot, the Gothic inventiveness of late Victorian writers, and the birth of detective fiction. Below, we introduce twelve of the greatest nineteenth-century novels, with some curious facts about them. Jane Austen, Pride
Emma Straub and her husband own Books Are Magic, an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, New York. Four years ago, Judy Blume and her husband, George Cooper, longing for a bookstore in Key West where they live, founded the independent, non-profit Books & Books @ The Studios. Tonight, the two writers turned booksellers sit down to
From Greek mythology to modern horror and fantasy, literature is full of fantastic beasts and terrifying monsters. What makes a great fictional monster? Terror, unpredictability, and perhaps an unsettling commingling of the familiar with the unfamiliar? These qualities can all help to create a truly scary monster which haunts our dreams, even though we know
TODAY: In 1944, W.G. Sebald is born. “A chorus of voices have warned that a catastrophe such as the one that we are now living through loomed on the horizon”: Mike Davis on the inevitably of a pandemic. | Lit Hub If you’re not already rereading your favorite books all the time, Natalie Jenner recommends
‘Ode to the West Wind’ is one of the best-known and best-loved poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). It is a quintessential Romantic poem. But what does it mean? Its closing words are well-known and often quoted, but how does the rest of the poem build towards them? The best way to go about offering
Ryan Chapman hosts Nerd Jeopardy, the online literary game show. Tonight Ryan is joined by Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things, and Katie Whittemore, translator of Sara Mesa’s Four by Four. This week’s indie bookstore spotlight is on Magers & Quinn. Sign up for next week, May 20, with guests Tracy O’Neill and Matt Gallagher. *
The Middle Ages, especially the period from the Norman Conquest of 1066 in England until the Renaissance in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, has been popular in fiction at least since Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott’s hugely influential historical novel from 1819. Below, we introduce ten of our favourite novels, from over two centuries
May 15, 2020, 1:05pm Most of my friends were very disappointed when, on their eleventh birthdays, they received no letter from Hogwarts. Me? I was always more of a Lightning Thief kind of girl. (Don’t @ me!) To all my fellow Percy Jackson fans who were similarly upset that a Fury never attacked them on a
‘Success Is Counted Sweetest’ is not as famous as some of Emily Dickinson’s other poems, but she was a prolific poet, and this one is well worth reading. Indeed, it has a peculiar place in Dickinson’s oeuvre, being one of just seven poems which were published during her lifetime. (It’s not quite true that Dickinson