Literature

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The American poet Amanda Gorman was born in 1998, and when she was still in her early twenties she was reading her poetry in front of an audience of millions: she has performed her poems at US presidential inaugurations and at the Super Bowl, watched by nearly 100 million

The following is excerpted from Nikole Hannah-Jones’s preface to The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. The 1619 Project was originally launched at The New York Times Magazine in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. Below, Hannah-Jones tells the story of the fights—among historians and politicians—that the project provoked, including the

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘America’ is a 1921 poem by Claude McKay (1889-1948), a Jamaican-American poet who is often regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. In ‘America’, McKay offers an ambivalent and deeply critical appraisal of the United States of America in the 1920s. Let’s go through the poem

February 10, 2023, 10:34am Today, in casting news that just feels right: Kristen Stewart will be starring as Susan Sontag in a biopic based on  Benjamin Moser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 biography Sontag: Her Life and Work. Kristen Stewart is no stranger to biopics, having starred, most recently, as Princess Diana in 2021’s Spencer as well as 2009’s The Runaways (as Joan

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Acrostic poems are great fun to read. They may be even more fun to write. Many of the best and most famous acrostic poems in the English language were poems written for a particular recipient, whose name is ‘hidden’ within the poem. So, how is this achieved? What is

TODAY: In 1963, Sylvia Plath dies.    Booksellers from The Strand remember the coolest celebrity “cart shark” of them all: Television frontman Tom Verlaine. | Lit Hub Bookstores & Libraries Food as sustenance and political metaphor: How White House dinners shape presidential policy. | Lit Hub Politics “Will this book, like so many cultural products made by creatives of

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ is a 1953 short story by Roald Dahl (1916-90), which was initially rejected for publication but was later adapted for television on several occasions. Included in Dahl’s collections Someone Like You (1953) and Tales of the Unexpected (1979), the story is about a wife who

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode, Andrew talks to The Color Storm author Damien Dibben about the Venetian Renaissance, the importance of color in art, and why

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) After the Declaration of Independence, probably the most important and influential document of the American Revolution was a short pamphlet written not by an American, but by an English writer who had been living in America for less than 15 months. But although his country of birth was the

February 10, 2023, 11:17am Percival Everett, one of the country’s most prolific and critically acclaimed “writer’s writers,” has just inked a deal for what seems certain to be his highest profile novel to date. James, Everett’s 24th novel, has been pitched as “a harrowing and ferociously funny retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the

‘The World Is Too Much With Us’ is perhaps William Wordsworth’s finest sonnet. Published in 1807, it offers, in just fourteen lines, a miniature ‘manifesto’ for Romanticism, as Wordsworth bemoans the ways that modern life is preventing us from fully appreciating the wonders of the natural world. Let’s take a closer look at ‘The World

The following first appeared in Lit Hub’s The Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. I’ve just returned from a long walk with my dog, Freddie, a cloud-white bichon frisé with a sunny disposition and a jaunty tail. For Freddie, the senses are not a leash but an all-day party: the world of the body is delicious; movement

‘House Taken Over’ is a 1946 short story by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar (1914-84). In the story, a brother and sister living in a large house in Buenos Aires feel that their house is gradually being taken over by some mysterious intruders. Eventually, they decide they must leave the house. You can read ‘House

February 9, 2023, 11:26am Yesterday morning, The Washington Post’s Ron Charles published a summary of “what readers hate most in books“—the result, Charles tells us, of asking the readers of the Post’s Book Club newsletter to write in with their pet peeves. “The responses were a tsunami of bile,” Charles writes. “Apparently, book lovers have

‘Women’ is a 1970 poem by Alice Walker (born 1944), one of the best-known African American writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Although she is probably most famous for her 1982 novel The Color Purple, Walker has written short stories and numerous other novels. She also started out her published career as

The following is from Dizz Tate’s Brutes. Tate grew up in Florida and lives in London, U.K. She has had short stories published in The Stinging Fly, Dazed, No Tokens Journal, Five Dials, 3:AM Magazine, among other publications. She was long-listed for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2020 and won the Bristol

‘A White Heron’ is one of the best-known short stories by the American writer Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909). Published in 1886 in the collection A White Heron and Other Stories, the story is about a young girl who is approached by a hunter who offers her money if she will divulge the location of a

February 8, 2023, 12:35pm The Academy Awards approach. And so, as we’ve done in the past, we have been preparing for the Fake Oscars by thinking about the Real Oscars: that’s right, the Book Oscars. Er, the Book Oscars that aren’t the National Book Awards. You can wear a gown to the National Book Awards.