Literature

TODAY: In 1859, Swedish poet, novelist, and Nobel Prize laureate Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam is born.         Here are the 166 titles we’ll be reading in the second half of the year. | Lit Hub Reading Lists “I am almost always the main character in my stories of my parents’ music.” Keziah Weir reflects on

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666’ is a poem by Anne Bradstreet (1612-72), a Puritan poet who was the first person in America, male or female, to have a book of poems published. In 1650 her volume The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America

July shone bright in our 2023 SFF preview, with a bevy of dying-to-read books from Chuck Tingle, Daniel Abraham, Kemi Ashing-Giwa, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. But if you can believe it, those picks were hard-won, with so many more to choose from. Basically, I’ve been waiting half a year to tell you about the rest of

Even though Franz Kafka had been dead since 1924, his writing would provide Cold War-era writers and intellectuals in the United States with a literary vocabulary for imagining life behind the Iron Curtain. After the Second World War, a wave of new Kafka translations, editions, and critical works swept across the English-speaking world. In retrospect,

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Let’s take a closer look at some of the most notable quotations from one of Ray Bradbury’s very best stories, ‘The Veldt’ (1952). The story must certainly rank among Bradbury’s most unsettling, because it suggests that children have the capacity to do terrible things, and to turn on the

The following is from Mihret Sibhat’s The History of a Difficult Child. Sibhat was born and raised in a small town in western Ethiopia before moving to California when she was seventeen. A graduate of California State University, Northridge, and the University of Minnesota’s MFA program, she was a 2019 A Public Space Fellow and

Michael Finkel’s The Art Thief, Jennifer Ackerman’s What An Owl Knows, and Sarah Viren’s To Name the Bigger Lie all feature among the best reviewed nonfiction titles of the month. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.” * 1. The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Mexican Movies’ is a short story from Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, a 1991 collection of short stories by the American writer Sandra Cisneros (born 1954). In the story, a young Chicana girl describes going to her local movie theatre to see Mexican movies with her parents and

Worn-out phrases can make a reader roll their eyes, or worse—give up on a book altogether. Clichés are viewed as a sign of lazy writing, but they didn’t get to be that way overnight; many modern clichés read as fresh and evocative when they first appeared in print, and were memorable enough that people continue

TODAY: In 1905, Albert Einstein publishes On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, in which he introduces special relativity.       Also on Lit Hub: 10 nonfiction books to read this July • Life under occupation in WWII • Read from Mihret Sibhat’s debut novel, The History of a Difficult Child

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The Book of Esther has a surprising claim to fame: it’s the only book in the Bible in which the word ‘God’ does not appear. (Curiously, it is also the only biblical book to mention the country of India, when the author is describing the breadth of the Persian

June 30, 2023, 9:57am Fans of the publisher World Editions, which has brought translations of work by Maryse Condé, Amin Maalouf, Pilar Quintana, Jaap Robben and Zhang Yueran to English-language audiences, has found a new owner—none other than the US director Christine Swedowsky. A rare fairy-tale finish! World Editions was previously owned by Libella Publishing

There are things you want from an Indiana Jones movie. You want Indy to to yell directions at a stunned, fuddy-duddy academic while trying to dodge bullet spray. You want Indy to shove the lid off a big stone tomb, and maybe even yank an antique out from the stiff grip of the skeleton inside

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Commuter’ is an early short story by Philip K. Dick (1928-82), which appeared in the science-fiction magazine Amazing in 1953. The short story is perhaps best categorised and analysed as an alternative history story, so it qualifies as ‘fantasy’ in the broad sense of the definition. Summary ‘The

TODAY: In 1892, American crime writer James M. Cain is born.   “To speak as Tibetans, to write as Tibetans, is to continually recreate the Tibetan nation.” Tenzin Dickie considers the Tibetan essay. | Lit Hub History On the art thieves who steal for love. | Lit Hub Art John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle consider the “deep sincerity” of

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.’ Who said, or wrote, this well-known sentence? Karl Marx? Vladimir Lenin? Not either of those political figures, but someone who lived quite a long time before either of them. For the thinker who actually said ‘man is born free,

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Strength can take many forms: physical toughness and sheer muscle, strength of character and qualities such as perseverance, and strength of mind. Poets have paid tribute to all of these kinds of strength, as the following classic poems demonstrate. 1. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’. Tho’ much is taken, much

June 29, 2023, 12:57pm I’m going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There’s something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I’ll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I