Literature

November 7, 2022, 1:33pm In honor of tomorrow’s US midterm elections (NB: please vote), I present: a little literary inspiration for the tireless Democratic party email scribes. Moby-DickThis is important, Ishmael. Mrs DallowayMrs Dalloway said she would FUND the GOP HERSELF. David CopperfieldWhether you will turn out to be a HERO for your party, or

TODAY: In 1872, poet and violinist Leonora Speyer is born.    Laura van den Berg kicks off When I’m Not Writing, a new series about writers and their hobbies, with a reflection on why she took up boxing. | Lit Hub “Whether by breast or bottle, no two feeds are alike.” Alice Bloch talks to

Gayl Jones, the highly acclaimed author who was first “discovered” and mentored by Toni Morrison, has twice disappeared from our sight. The first time was after a stellar launch as one of America’s most daring and distinctive literary lights, after two brilliant novels (Corregidora and Eva’s Man) brought out by Morrison at Random House, and

People sometimes ask me if having been a librarian helps me in being a writer. The honest answer is that sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. It doesn’t help to know, for example, how many books already get published every year in all categories (close to a million, not counting self-published books), or how

November 4, 2022, 9:10am Yesterday, Netflix dropped the nudity-forward trailer for its new adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s “controversial classic” Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was famously banned for being obscene—specifically due to thirteen “episodes of sexual intercourse” in the book, “described in the greatest detail. . . leaving nothing to the imagination,” not to mention, among

TODAY: In 1963, Spanish poet Luis Cernuda dies. Emily Temple rounds up the 60 greatest academic satires, campus novels, and boarding school bildungsromans of the last 100 years. | Lit Hub Reading Lists Lynn Caponera considers the wild and wonderful legacy of Maurice Sendak’s creations (and his rigorous work routine). | Lit Hub Art & Photography “To publish a collection of

‘The Flowers’ is a 1973 short story by Alice Walker. Running to just two pages and under 600 words, the story can be regarded as an example of flash fiction or micro-fiction. It tells of a ten-year-old girl’s discovery, while out picking flowers, of the skeleton of an African-American man who was lynched in the

November 4, 2022, 9:51am Well, here’s a study conducted purely to pander to the book internet: Researchers in the psychology department at St. Mary’s University in Calgary found that seven to eight year olds who read out loud to therapy dogs for fifteen minutes every week over an eight-week period saw greater improvement in their

TODAY: In 1936, C.K. Williams is born.   How to bake black pepper snowballs… vengefully. | Lit Hub Food Costumes, plotting, mise-en-scène, monologues: Lyle Jeremy Rubin on how war becomes a (deadly) performance. | Lit Hub Memoir They lie to us, they weigh about as much as a hardback copy of Infinite Jest, and other

November 3, 2022, 5:04pm A producing power trio of Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, The Whale, etc), Danny Stong (Dopesick, Game Change, The Butler) and Kit Steinkellner (Sorry for Your Loss) has scored a pilot order from FX for an adaptation of Catherine Lacey’s The Answers. Lacey’s near-future dystopian novel—the story of Mary Parsons,

TODAY: In 1901, André Malraux is born.   Lynn Caponera considers the wild and wonderful legacy of Maurice Sendak’s creations (and his rigorous work routine). | Lit Hub Art & Photography Candidus, Vindex, Populus, Shippen, and other journalistic pseudonyms Samuel Adams used to fight for independence. | Lit Hub History “This year of trying to

‘Gretel in Darkness’ is a 1975 poem by Louise Glück. The poem is a dramatic monologue spoken by Gretel, the little girl from the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. In the poem, Gretel reflects on how she is haunted psychologically by the memory of the witch she killed, in order to save herself and

November 2, 2022, 1:33pm Joan Didion’s estate sale, “An American Icon: Property From the Collection of Joan Didion,” hosted by Stair Galleries, is open for bidding now through November 16. The collection includes plenty of iconic art, eyewear, and furniture, as well as a few items that I think deserve special mention. After all, as

It’s March, a month past my fourteenth birthday, and I still haven’t gotten it. My mother reminds me that she was sixteen. How humiliating! Or maybe she was glad because in her day they didn’t have sanitary pads and had to use rags. Rags that had to be washed and dried, then used again, and

November 1, 2022, 10:30am In a particularly heinous act of literary graverobbing a guy named Johnny Teague—a pastor and businessman running for congress in Texas’s 7th district—has written a “sequel” to The Diaries of Anne Frank. Yup. According to Jewish Telegraphic Agency: The Lost Diary of Anne Frank, imagines the famous Jewish Holocaust victim’s final

TODAY: In 1956, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems is published by City Lights Books. “Even—or perhaps particularly—in the land of my ancestors, I am expected to be the servant and not the guest.” Dionne Irving considers tourism and the remnants of empire in Jamaica. | Lit Hub Travel 18 new books to kick off your

‘The Village’ is a chapter from Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden; or, Life in the Woods. The book details Thoreau’s decision to leave behind modern civilisation and live a simple life in the woods in Massachusetts. In the chapter titled ‘The Village’, which can be read here, Thoreau describes his regular visits to the

October 31, 2022, 1:34pm There’s something about short stories that screams Halloween to me; I think it’s because they’re the perfect length to be read around a campfire, or with a flashlight in hand on a dark and stormy night. And because there is nothing scarier than the rampant and irresponsible consolidation of big corporate