Literature

April 20, 2023, 12:37pm Shh shhshh! Jack Thorne, who adapted Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials for TV, has the conch! Along with the production company behind Sex Education, Thorne will be adapting William Golding’s Lord of the Flies for a BBC TV series, Deadline reports, and somewhere, a prop stylist is forming Piggy’s ill-fated spectacles.

Religion is an important feature of many people’s lives, so it shouldn’t surprise us that many writers of short stories have written about religion from various perspectives: the power of superstitious belief, the importance of religious conversion, the cultural role of Christianity, and many other religious attitudes and themes. Below, we introduce some of the

April 19, 2023, 2:42pm One more reason to love the New York Public Library—the Young Lions Fiction Award, which was founded by Ethan Hawke, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Rick Moody, and Hannah McFarland, and recognizes American fiction writers 35 and under with a $10,000 prize. Past recipients include Catherine Lacey and Ling Ma. This year’s judges

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ is a phrase which has the ring of an anonymous proverb handed down over the centuries, a pithy apercu whose author and true origins are both lost in the mists of history. However, this assumption would be quite wrong. We know

TODAY: In 1989, English novelist and playwright Daphne du Maurier dies at 81.    “In the frequency of our family there is hum, high and happy, of three humans sharing their lives with a beast.” Ramona Ausubel on falling with a dog (and the world). | Lit Hub Animals Alison L. Strayer describes the process

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) In his vast Guide to Modern World Literature, Martin Seymour-Smith calls Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman the only true poetic innovators in nineteenth-century American poetry. But in fact, Dickinson’s eccentric use of slant rhyme and Whitman’s development of free verse are both anticipated in the work of an earlier

April 18, 2023, 10:26am First of all, if you’re a teen who likes to write, keep at it, and don’t let anyone tell you different. (And if you’re the parent of a teen who likes to write, please encourage them.) With the above in mind, the Miami Book Fair is offering a virtual summer camp

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The best-laid schemes of mice and men’ is one of those literary quotations which have slipped free of their origins and taken on a whole new, proverbial meaning. This phrase has issued from the mouths of people who have doubtless never read the poem in which it initially appeared,

April 18, 2023, 11:16am Fans of Anthony Doerr’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning novel All The Light We Cannot See have something to chew on today, with the release of the first trailer for Netflix’s adaptation, directed by Deadpool and Stranger Things(?!) producer Shawn Levy. Steven Knight, creator of Peaky Blinders, adapted the book for television.

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Both Sides Now’ is one of Joni Mitchell’s best-known songs. But the meaning of the song is less universally understood. Is it a coming-of-age celebration of learning wisdom, a lament for lost innocence, or a song about being unable to part with one’s illusions, even once our experience of

April 17, 2023, 11:03am In a plot straight from a Cohen Brothers’ movie—think “high stakes/low IQ”—a former romance novel cover model has been sentenced to 36 months in prison for his violent role in the January 6 Capitol Insurrection. Logan James Barnhart, whose chest has graced the covers of such classics as Stepbrother UnSEALed: A

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The phrase ‘all’s well that ends well’ has attained the status of a proverb, so that may lead us to believe that it should be attributed to that most prolific of all authors, ‘Anon.’ But in fact, the phrase can be fairly confidently ascribed to a particular writer. But

April 17, 2023, 12:03pm When Ashley C. Ford showed up to the book club in March, she found an audience who had all read her 2021 bestseller, Somebody’s Daughter, and were primed for a lively discussion. “I gotta tell you, I’ve been to a lot of bookstores where they didn’t do that,” Ford laughs. The

‘To the University of Cambridge, in New England’ is a poem written by Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-84) and sees her addressing the students of Harvard University, cautioning them against being sinful. The poem was probably written in 1767 and published in 1773. Wheatley was the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry: Poems

For a long time, I didn’t enjoy literary Twitter because so much of the content was about mediocre (and ephemeral) contemporary writers, but I figured I just wasn’t following the right people. So I pared down my list and sought out publications, newsletters, and individuals who are interested in classic literature: the so-called Great Books

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’ has become a pithy saying, a proverb almost, whose origins we may well assume to have been lost in the mists of time. So many proverbs which have entered common usage tend to be ascribed to that prolific author, ‘Anon.’ Is it the

TODAY: In 1818, Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language is printed.    Jena Friedman asks her favorite male comedians—Jon Stewart, Reggie Watts, and Bob Odenkirk among them—some of the inane questions she gets as a “woman in comedy.” | Lit Hub Humor Why the culture around Great Books is hostile to trans people. (Or,

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Beauty is an important subject for many writers, whether describing a person, a landscape, a painting, or even another piece of writing. We talk of ‘beautiful poetry’, a ‘beautiful view’, and ‘beautiful works of art’. But as these examples show, the word ‘beautiful’ can soon be overused so it