Literature

I teach songwriting, but when I want to talk with students about the process they’re engaged in, I turn to prose writers for help. I find that they’re just better at “writing about writing” than most musicians are, which maybe shouldn’t be a shocker: writing is what writers do. But when I’m really lucky, I’ll

‘Morning Poem’ is a poem by the American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), a poet who has perhaps not received as much attention from critics as she deserves. It’s been estimated that she was the bestselling poet in the United States at the time of her death, so a few words of analysis about some of

This talk was delivered at the 2019 Edinburgh International Book Festival. One of the longest biographies of recent years, the ill-fated Philip Roth by Blake Bailey, runs to 800 pages. It takes a total of 31 hours and 46 minutes to listen to on audiobook. Roth was 85 when he died, so his real life

January 6, 2023, 9:07am Wow. Fay Weldon, who died earlier this week at 91, did not mince words. As chair of the 1983 Booker Prize committee (which awarded top honors to JM Coetzee’s sublimely bleak Life and Times of Michael K) Weldon was given the mic at the awards ceremony, and took the opportunity to

‘Life Doesn’t Frighten Me’ is a well-known poem by Maya Angelou (1928-2014). It is the title poem from Angelou’s 1993 collection Life Doesn’t Frighten Me, which was marketed as a children’s book although Angelou did not originally conceive the poems as being specifically for children. A brave, defiant poem about the power that can be

January 6, 2023, 10:56am This week, at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, Todd Field’s Tár was awarded Best Picture, and Cate Blanchett took home Best Actress for her performance. During her remarks, as Sam Adams reported on Twitter, she told the crowd, “When I was making Tár, I read a lot of Rebecca

TODAY:  In 1986, Mexican author Juan Rulfo dies at 67.    “I raised four children, wrote five more novels—and finally got old enough to think about being young.” Allegra Goodman on writing about youth. | Lit Hub Standing under Mussolini’s balcony: Andrea Bajani considers fascism and family in modern Italy (tr. by Minna Zallman Proctor). | Lit

Let’s begin our exploration of Churchill’s famous ‘fight them on the beaches’ speech with a few problematic statements: In June 1940, Winston Churchill gave a speech which roused and inspired the whole of Britain. He pledged to ‘fight on the beaches’ and never surrender. When he read the words out on the radio, his wartime

January 6, 2023, 12:02pm Because AI is apparently just like us, it seems to have romanticized the creative fields. So instead of, say, figuring out how to help me dispute denied insurance claims, it’s more interested in writing children’s books, getting into poetry, and now… narrating audiobooks. Yesterday, The Verge reported that Apple Books has

TODAY: In 1944, investigative journalist Ida Tarbell dies.     When imagination is an act of resistance: Michelle Nijhuis considers Sarah Polley’s new film adaptation of Women Talking. | Lit Hub Film & TV “Of all the trades in the world, there is only one that really suits me. That of eating, drinking, sleeping, playing, and

‘The Distances’ is a short story by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar (1914-84), published in his 1951 collection Bestiary. In the story, a woman discovers her ‘double’ while dreaming and then, in the real world, exchanges identities with this other woman. Like many of Julio Cortázar’s short stories, ‘The Distances’ is playful, dense, and difficult

‘Firework’ is one of Katy Perry’s best-known songs, and its lyrics were inspired by a classic work of literature, so we thought we’d consider Katy Perry’s song from a broadly ‘literary’ perspective. What is the meaning of the song’s lyrics? And which literary classic influenced the writing of those lyrics? ‘Firework’: song meaning The song’s

January 4, 2023, 12:03pm Today, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation announced the winners of their second annual Silvers-Dudley Prizes, which recognize “outstanding achievement in literary criticism, arts writing, and journalism.” The prizes, which carry a total value of $135,000, will award between $15,000 and $30,000 to six writers in three categories. “The Silvers Foundation is

TODAY: In 1920, Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós dies.    Also on Lit Hub: Why I had to get older to write about youth • On translation and inherited trauma (or, what it means to truly inhabit an author’s work) • Read from Tom Crewe’s debut novel, The New Life

‘The Swan’ is a poem by the American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), who has perhaps not received as much attention from critics as she deserves. It’s been estimated that she was the bestselling poet in the United States at the time of her death, so a few words of analysis about some of her work

January 3, 2023, 12:31pm Here’s a piece of good literary news to start the year: a new independent bookstore named after the legendary Octavia E. Butler is opening in Pasadena, California, where the late Sci-Fi icon was born and raised. I took the leap and quit my job to open my very own bookstore. Octavia’s

January 3, 2023, 7:14am Another year, another batch of new books to look forward to. If any of your resolutions involve reading more, we’ve got you covered. * Deepti Kapoor, Age of Vice(Riverhead) “Riveting … Kapoor paints a mesmerizing picture of violence and decadence, of struggle and hope, of corruption and redemption.”–BookPage Teju Cole, Black

‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’ is a polemical essay by James Baldwin (1924-87), published in 1949. In the essay, Baldwin outlines the problem with novels which highlight the oppression of black people in the United States, starting with Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the 1850s. For Baldwin, these novels are fantasies which actually perpetuate the status quo rather