Literature

March 8, 2023, 11:08am Today, over at Conjunctions, you can read “Every Friday Nite is Kiddies Nite,” a previously unpublished short story by Tennessee Williams—part of the forthcoming collection The Caterpillar Dogs and Other Early Stories, which will be published by New Directions in April. “‘Every Friday Nite is Kiddies Nite,’ written before 1939, was

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Love Story’ is one of Taylor Swift’s best-known songs. Released in 2008, it appeared on her second studio album, Fearless. But what is the meaning of this classic Swift ballad, and what was the inspiration behind the song? What influenced Swift in writing the song’s lyrics? ‘Love Story’ details

March 7, 2023, 3:42pm For someone who has foreseen the downfall of society, Margaret Atwood sure is chipper and fast with the reparteé. Take her recent WIRED interview with Kate Knibbs (lucky you, Kate!), who did a great job of facilitating a wide-ranging and titillating chat about everything from ChatGPT to aging. Atwood’s new short

Tolerance is an important topic in literature, because to tolerate something also involves an acknowledgment that there is a potential objection to the thing being tolerated. Nobody ‘tolerates’ winning a million pounds on the lottery, but we talk of ‘tolerating’ the loud music coming from a neighbour’s house when they’re having a barbecue, with ‘tolerating’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Perhaps the most famous idea in all of Plato’s work is the Allegory of the Cave. This much-discussed (and much-misunderstood) story is a key part of Plato’s Republic, a work which has the claim to be the first ever literary utopia. In The Republic, Plato and a number of

TODAY: In 1923, The New Republic publishes Robert Frost’s iconic poem “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.”   If you’re heading to Seattle for AWP, here’s where to eat, drink, and visit, according to local writers. | Lit Hub 11 new books to get your hands on this week. | The Hub OSCARS WEEK: What

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the greatest of all Irish poets. His first collection, Crossways, appeared in 1889 when he was still in his mid-twenties, and his early poetry bore the clear influence of Romanticism. As his career developed and literary innovations came with modernism in the early decades of the twentieth century,

March 6, 2023, 3:38pm The Book of Animal Secrets: Nature’s Lessons for a Long and Happy Life is not supposed to publish until tomorrow, March 7th, but is already a bestseller thanks to author Dr. David Agus’s comfort in the media habitat. He has been able to promote the book on CBS News and The Howard

‘I Stand Here Ironing’ is a 1956 short story by Tillie Olsen, first published in Prairie Schooner under the title ‘Help Her to Believe’. It acquired its more famous title when it was republished in Olsen’s 1961 collection Tell Me a Riddle. The story takes the form of a monologue spoken by a mother who

March 6, 2023, 10:21am You cannot be president unless you first allow yourself to imagine yourself as president. So goes the wisdom of self-help author and new-age guru Marianne Williamson, who is back, baby, with a 2024 run for the top job (before enlightenment itself). Speaking with the New York Times at her weekend campaign

If the literary landscape of the early twentieth century, at least when it comes to short stories, is dominated by Anglophone writers like Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, then the mid-twentieth century arguably belongs to the Latin American writers who helped to move the short story form into new and exciting directions. Magical

March 3, 2023, 10:21am The portrait is stern, defiant, of bountiful hairline. Shot by Ramona Rosales for the cover of Prince Harry’s memoir Spare, it planted a flag in the golden Californian soil and hung a shark-tooth necklace around the decrepit institution it set out to eviscerate. Tiled in your local Barnes & Noble, it

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Running up that Hill’ is one of Kate Bush’s best-known and best-loved songs. The album on which it appeared, Hounds of Love (1985), represented a return to form for Bush after several years of less critically acclaimed (and commercially successful) releases. But in order to understand the true meaning

March 3, 2023, 11:54am Last night, the great pens of America convened at The Town Hall in NYC as Kal Penn presided over the 2023 PEN America Literary Awards. For those felled by late-winter viruses who desire to get a taste of proceedings, a recording is available here. Below are this year’s winners: PEN/Jean Stein

Emily Dickinson (1830-86) is one of the greatest American poets of the nineteenth century: the critic Martin Seymour-Smith, in his Guide to Modern World Literature, calls her one of only two great nineteenth-century American poets (the other being Walt Whitman). Dickinson wrote a great deal of poetry. Her Complete Poems includes almost 2,000 poems, most of

March 3, 2023, 11:54am Bad Robot has snagged the film rights to Mona Awad’s bestselling 2019 novel Bunny—a bloody satire of elite MFA programs that became a BookTok sensation after a Bunny movie fan-casting hashtag went viral. How viral? Somewhere in the region of 4.1 billion views. Bunny, now in its fourteenth printing, follows follows Samantha

‘The Necklace’ is an 1884 short story by the French writer Guy de Maupassant (1850-93), first published in Le Gaulois as ‘La parure’ in February of that year. If you’re unfamiliar with Maupassant’s work, ‘The Necklace’ is his most famous tale, and worth taking the time to read. If you’re a fan of stories with

TODAY: In 1945, poet Pablo Neruda is elected a Chilean senator.   Alice Robb on being unproductive at a writing residency: “I left not with the finished chapters I had hoped for, but with the knowledge that writing is—at least for me—a social act.” | Lit Hub Willard Spiegelman on pinning down the biography of poet Amy