Literature

TODAY: In 1899, French actress Sarah Bernhardt premieres an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with herself in the title role.    “We’re holding the city. Ukrainian flags are fluttering above it.” From Kharkiv, Serhiy Zhadan records the first month of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. | Lit Hub When Arthur Conan Doyle got pranked by a couple of schoolgirls. |
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This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. I’m fortunate that I’ve never been in a real physical fight, but I’ve been in plenty of sparring matches. Sure, I lost most of them, but I’d like to think I learned a few things from the various martial arts instructors screaming exasperatedly at me
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The Beat Poets were an important movement in American poetry in the 1950s and 1960s. Favouring free verse and spontaneous writing in many cases, poets of the Beat Generation sought a more direct and authentic poetic voice. Many of the Beats felt a great sense of disillusionment in the
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fragments from a wedding ______________________________ & a funeral • my sister janice is getting married. she’s being passed around like she’s bread, & everyone’s butter, complimenting her hair, her make up, her dress: a pearl’s insides. she’s blow-fishing BIG with love— laughing HAHAHAHAHAHAHA—& you’re telling me you hate weddings. i don’t get why we still
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Additionally’ is a useful word: so useful that a writer can find themselves in danger of overusing it in certain contexts. What viable alternative words are there which can serve as good synonyms for the word additionally? Let’s take a look at the best additionally synonyms, exploring how they
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TODAY: In 1873, Dorothy Richardson, author of Pilgrimage, a sequence of 13 novels, is born. She was one of the earliest modernist novelists to use stream of consciousness as a narrative technique. (Pictured here with husband, illustrator Alan Odle.)   Also on Lit Hub: Nine utopian books to deprogram our brains • Obsessing over UFO videos—or,
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘22’ is a classic example of a pop song whose meaning appears straightforward but is, in fact, slightly more complex and ambiguous once we probe under the surface. Taken from her fourth album Red (2012), ‘22’ is in some ways a quintessential Taylor Swift song, combining poppy and uptempo
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TODAY: In 1955, James Agee dies at 45.     Abraham Verghese talks about writing The Covenant of Water, his memories of Kerala, humanism in medicine, and more. | Lit Hub In Conversation Say hello to 24 new books out today. | The Hub Emma Cline recommends baths as productive procrastination, and other insights from the
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May 15, 2023, 11:28am The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of American (SFWA) has announced the winners of the 2022 Nebula Awards, one of SFF’s most prestigious honors, “given to the writers of the most outstanding speculative fiction works released in 2022.” Here are the winners: NOVEL R.F. Kuang, Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An
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The following is from Karin Lin-Greenberg’s You Are Here. Lin-Greenberg is a Chinese American, award-winning writer. She is the author of two short story collections, Faulty Predictions and Vanished. Her fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Story, and Boulevard among others. Her short story “The Sweeper of Hair,” the basis of this novel’s opening
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Pablo Neruda (1904-73) is undoubtedly the most famous Chilean poet, and perhaps the greatest love poet in all of Latin-American literature. Neruda, who was born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (Pablo Neruda was his pen name, though he later changed it officially), won the Nobel Prize for Literature in
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