Literature

TODAY: In 1980, Jean-Paul Sartre dies at 74.   Uncovering art history in Western Ukraine: Benjamin Balint recounts the unlikely discovery of Bruno Schulz’s fairy-tale murals. | Lit Hub Art “What had I done, insisting on more of us?” Maggie Smith on the anxious, silent first year of motherhood. | Lit Hub Memoir Jena Friedman asks her favorite male comedians—Jon Stewart,

April 14, 2023, 11:34am This week, TIME magazine published its list of the 100 Most Influential People of 2023. And . . . it’s surprisingly literary! I mean, it’s not that literary, but considering that the TIME editors typically limit themselves to a single novelist among the 100, books seem to be coming up in the world: in

‘One of These Days’ (or ‘Un día de estos’ in the original Spanish) is a very short story by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014). Running to just three pages, the story can be regarded as a piece of flash fiction or micro-fiction. The story concerns a dentist who reluctantly agrees to extract the

April 14, 2023, 1:50pm Lit Hub Superfan Olivia Wilde is teaming up with powerhouse indie A24 to bring Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit From the Good Squad, as well as its 2022 sequel (of sorts) The Candy House, to the small screen. This will be the first major foray into television directing for the in-demand

‘My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn’ is the opening story in 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 girl describes her friendship with a girl named Lucy, and it emerges that the narrator envies Lucy’s home

April 13, 2023, 10:00am Salman Rushdie is made of sturdy stuff indeed. After a brutal attack at a reading in upstate NY in the summer of 2022, the author has been slowly recovering from his wounds, though, he tells Time in a new interview, “the eye is not coming back. The eye is lost.” In

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) We might say that a cliché is a truism plus time. And yet if we grant that the phrase ‘a sight for sore eyes’ is a cliché, we have to ask how such an odd turn of phrase came to be so well-known. Why should the speaker’s ‘eyes’ be

April 13, 2023, 11:26am Ten years—ten years!—reliving JK Rowling’s journey from underdog pastiche to problematic bajillionaire seems like a lot, doesn’t it? And yet Max (formerly HBO Max) plans on sinking millions into a long-running reboot of the YA property. Obviously a lot happens in the books—frogs are eaten, naked jealousy dreams are had, teachers

‘Love Calls Us to the Things of This World’ is a poem by the American poet Richard Wilbur, included in his 1956 collection Things of This World. In the poem, a man wakes one morning and is fascinated by the laundry outside his window, viewing it as a group of angels come down to earth.

April 12, 2023, 4:36pm The New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers has selected its 25th class of Cullman Fellows. This year, the fellows were chosen from a group of 408 applicants from 51 countries; they will receive a stipend and an office in the New York Public

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The One That Got Away’ is a song by Katy Perry. Taken from her third studio album, Teenage Dream (2010), the song sees the singer reminiscing about a relationship she had with someone who is now no longer her lover. He is the titular ‘one that got away’ from

April 12, 2023, 11:03am Oprah has one. Questlove has one. Fearne Cotton and Sarah Jessica Parker each have one. Lena Dunham had one. And now Gillian Flynn is getting in on the imprint action. Gillian Flynn Books will be a new imprint at Zando, and serve the world “off-kilter” fiction, allowing Flynn to “champion” books

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Walt Whitman (1819-92) is one of the few great nineteenth-century American poets. With his innovative free verse and celebration of the American landscape, he made his poetry a sort of literary declaration of independence, his long, sprawling lines having an almost prophetic quality. Whitman’s life fed into his distinctive

April 11, 2023, 2:51pm Laura Cogan, the reigning editor at literary journal ZYZZYVA is set to ride her proverbial Lime scooter out of the San Francisco environs after dedicating 10 years to the role as the sun rises on the reign of Oscar Villalon, the long-serving managing editor. Villalon has worked alongside Cogan for a

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘To err is human, to forgive divine’. This quotation carries the force of a proverb: the sort of thing that we might expect to find in the Biblical Book of Proverbs, from the Old Testament, or else perhaps in some Elizabethan book of folk wisdom, the author of this

April 11, 2023, 11:59am It’s technically been spring for a few weeks now, but here in the Northeast, it’s finally feeling like it. Daffodils are blooming, the grass is growing, and the sun is slowly returning my will to live. Three years ago around this time, I wrote about the best rain in literature, but

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) With their 1982 album Toto IV, Toto scored a string of hits which continue to enjoy regular radio airtime and a popular fanbase: ‘Rosanna’ was one, and ‘I Won’t Hold You Back’ (memorably sampled by Roger Sanchez for his 2001 dance hit ‘Another Chance’) was another. But the success

April 10, 2023, 10:39am We have ceded more terrain to the robots. A ToolTester survey found that people surveyed in late 2023, 53% incorrectly identified AI-generated writing as human-made; a figure that rose to 63.5% when the technology was more advanced (GPT-4). So, not only will robots be able to hunt us down with lasers,