Literature

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘This Charming Man’ is one of the best-known songs by the Manchester indie band The Smiths. The song has an interesting genesis: the Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr later said that he came up with the jangly guitar riff to ‘This Charming Man’ after hearing the Aztec Camera song ‘Walk

TODAY: In 1816, Jane Austen responds to a letter from the Prince Regent suggesting she write a historic romance, saying, “I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life.”  Allegra Hyde considers the “slippery, maddening, even disastrous” task of ending a story. | Lit Hub Craft

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Easy on Me’ is one of Adele’s most widely discussed songs. Written by Adele herself with the song’s producer Greg Kurstin, it was the lead single from Adele’s fourth studio album, 30. The single was released in 2021. Since then, ‘Easy on Me’ has attracted lots of speculation and

March 31, 2023, 7:47am As April rolls around and scattered showers might keep us indoors (or nudge us to a sheltered spot outdoors), it’s a great time to revisit the books we had been meaning to read. Whether you choose to read indoors or out—and I support both—a list of some intriguing books that will

By Dr Oliver Tearle ‘Interesting’ is a word that can quickly become boring, if overused or used in a rather vague or lazy way. So what other words are there which mean much the same as interesting, and which might serve as suitable alternatives? Below, we introduce some of the best synonyms – as well

March 31, 2023, 10:00am Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover of E. Lily Yu’s collection Jewel Box, 22 stories in which “the strange, the sublime, and the monstrous confront one another with astonishing consequences,” forthcoming from Erewhon Books this fall. Here’s some more about the book from the publisher: In the village of

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The character of Mollie, in George Orwell’s 1945 fable Animal Farm, may not be as familiar to many people as the pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, but she plays an important part in Orwell’s satire on the Russian Revolution (and the way its ideals were subsequently betrayed). But who is

This interview was first published in 2004. * Michael Silverblatt: I’m happy to have as my guest, Octavia Butler. And this is a special occasion. It’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of her book that first came out in 1979—Kindred. It’s a remarkable book, really a breathtaking book. It was recently adopted in that

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Couplets are an important component of so many classic poems. Strictly speaking, a couplet is just any two successive lines of verse, but when poetry critics use the term ‘couplet’, they are usually (though not always) referring to a rhyming pair of lines, as in this short, witty epigram

March 30, 2023, 9:55am God bless the staff of Washington DC’s Cleveland Park Library who welcomed yesterday’s all-star story hour roster of Very Online Conservative Snowflakes—Jack Posobiec, Kirk Cameron, Sean Spicer, and a woman named Libs of TikTok—with a prominent display of queer reading material. According to multiple accounts on Twitter, library staff set up

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most widely studied short stories. In just a few pages, Poe’s narrator outlines his animosity towards another man, and describes how he conceived and carried out his crime: trapping and murdering his ‘enemy’ by leading him down into the

The following is from Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad. Rafeyenko is an award-winning Ukrainian writer, poet, translator, and literary and film critic. Although he initially wrote and published in Russian, his novel Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love was his first written in Ukrainian. It was nominated for the Taras Shevchenko

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Rhyme is an important part of many poems, to the extent that, to many people, ‘rhyme’ is synonymous with ‘poetry’. ‘Does it rhyme?’ is the question many poets have been asked when they reveal to someone else that they write poetry. It’s worth bearing in mind that poetry, however,

March 29, 2023, 11:55am Tell me about my name, each of my children often begs, running through the kitchen like torn pages in search of their story. You can picture a young Rand Paul doing the same, and his parents sitting him on their lap to relay the first time they read Ayn Rand’s Atlas

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Outcasts of Poker Flat’ is a short story by the American writer Bret Harte (1836-1902), published in 1869 in the Overland Monthly magazine. The story helped to confirm Harte’s reputation as an exciting new talent, and by 1871 he was the highest-paid writer in the country. ‘The Outcasts

It was the spring semester of 2009, and I was alone in my dorm room, looking over notes for my film class on Spike Lee, trying to connect Malcolm X and Mo’ Better Blues in a way that felt entirely original. Blu & Exile’s Below the Heavens played as loudly as my second-generation MacBook would

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Emily Dickinson (1830-86) is one of the most original poets of the nineteenth century. If we set her work alongside that of her contemporaries, perhaps it is only Walt Whitman, who pioneered free verse, and, in Britain, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who opted for ‘sprung rhythm’ over more traditional metre

March 28, 2023, 12:42pm First, there was Helen Mirren as Regal Patricia Highsmith. Then came Oscar Isaac as Sexy Kurt Vonnegut. Now, get ready for Chris Chalk as Super Intense James Baldwin. Yes, continuing the recent trend of casting Hollywood and prestige TV stars as iconic mid-century writers, Chalk (Perry Mason, Underground, Gotham) is set to