Literature

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Quatrains are found in some of the best-known poems in the English language (and in other languages, too). From border ballads to contemporary poems, the quatrain – a four-line unit or stanza – has proved useful to many poets over the centuries. Quatrains can be unrhymed, but when they

The following first appeared in Lit Hub’s The Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. One day, in the midst of working on my first novel in English, I was overwhelmed by a wave of frustration with my adopted language. With some fury, I knocked this out on the page and decided not to translate it: 我说我爱你，你说你爱自由。 为什么自由比爱更重要。没有爱，自由是赤裸裸的一片世界。

By Dr Oliver Tearle To be ‘submissive’ is to submit: to yield obediently to some higher or greater power or authority, and allow oneself to be dominated by that higher power. So people are sometimes described as having a submissive personality or behaving in a submissive way. (The word submit is from Latin words meaning

1.Read a miniature abridged Little Women by flashlight. Snuggle under thick quilts during a summer storm, deep in the pine-scented woods on Maine. As rain clatters onto the log cabin’s roof, whisper the sisters’ names: Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy.  2.Grow up with Jo. Return every summer vacation to this book and take stock of

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The poems of Anne Sexton (1928-74) have not, perhaps, received their full due. As Michael Schmidt notes in his compendious Lives of the Poets, Sexton’s work has come to be viewed as a ‘footnote’ to the work of the much better-known Sylvia Plath, who was influenced by Sexton’s work.

March 10, 2023, 12:16pm Listen… can you hear the denim moving across a stage in California, the swish of gelled hair? S.E. Hinton’s beloved novel The Outsiders has been adapted into a musical at La Jolla Playhouse, with solid reviews following the open. If you haven’t pawed at a paperback of The Outsiders since adolescence,

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 short story ‘Young Goodman Brown’ is now regarded as one of his greatest works of short fiction. This powerful tale about good and evil, Puritanism and temptation, is full of revealing quotations which help to put across the story’s overarching ‘message’. Let’s take a closer look at some of the quotations from

TODAY: In 1744, English auction house Sotheby’s holds its first ever auction (of books) in London. (Pictured above is a 1888 Sotheby’s book auction.)   Geoffrey D. Morrison on the mundane letters of John Keats. | Lit Hub Criticism Jenny Jackson, longtime editor turned debut author, describes the growing pains of switching roles. | Lit

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Picking the ‘most famous poems’ ever written is always going to be tricky. For one thing, it varies from country to country, culture to culture, language to language. So we’d best lay down some justifications for our decisions before we offer our pick of twenty of the most famous

March 10, 2023, 12:36pm Gone are the days when you could write a book a chapter at a time and hook people in a slow, serial burn. Now, if the internet is to believed, one must amass 100,000 followers on social media before they can even be considered for a book deal (every writer ever:

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ is Martin Luther King’s most famous written text, and rivals his most celebrated speech, ‘I Have a Dream’, for its political importance and rhetorical power. King wrote this open letter in April 1963 while he was imprisoned in the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama. When

The Last of Us—HBO’s star-studded adaptation of the VERY popular video game of the same name—has been a huge hit. Whether or not you think it veers too far from the game (or hews too close, or is politically compromised), you’ve probably kept watching it, week in, week out. The story itself is not an

March 9, 2023, 1:43pm There is a literary phenomenon that afflicts married people, in which a writer they have embraced as speaking their very thoughts puts out a new book, and it is a divorce book. This triggers a certain paranoid crisis: do you read the book, or will the divorcing catch? Are you in

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was a poet, playwright, andfeminist, who enjoyed considerable success during the ‘Roaring Twenties’. As A. Mary Murphy notes in The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry, Millay’s poetry books sold in the sorts of numbers we usually associate with

TODAY: In 1892, poet and novelist Vita Sackville, considered the inspiration for the androgynous protagonist of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, is born.    Fabulous fungi: On the endless possibilities of the mushroom. | Lit Hub Nature “Race is not usually considered an example of desire.” Read new poetry by Monica Youn. | Lit Hub Poetry Oscars Countdown: What to read (and watch)

‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ is a short story by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), first published in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in December 1844. The story is about an Italian medical researcher who grows poisonous plants in his garden. His daughter grows up to be immune to all of the poisons – but

March 8, 2023, 3:23pm “I like to think I sprang from a head,” Patricia Lockwood once wrote, “I like to think the head was mine.” We cannot all come into the world with divine knowledge of the written word immaculately stacked into the halls of our minds, but we could perhaps manage to be born

What are the best poems about knowledge? Poetry often contains a kind of wisdom or deeper knowledge: about the world, about love, about what might await us after we die. Whether we agree with the forms of knowledge poets postulate or vehemently disagree, the poet is often seeking out, in William Blake’s memorable phrase, ‘the