Literature

August 2, 2023, 12:49pm Hi Barbie! Are you looking for a good book to read? Maybe to take to the Beach? And/or to bring with you when you go to the movies this weekend? I promise, it’s going to be right up your alley. And also pink, for outfit coordination purposes, of course. You’re welcome.

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Of all of the tracks on Taylor Swift’s 2020 album Evermore, ‘Marjorie’ is perhaps the most tenderly personal. The lyrics honour someone very dear to the singer: someone who was a singer herself. But the ‘Marjorie’ of the song’s title also has another important link with Swift. ‘Marjorie’: song

August 2, 2023, 12:52pm James Baldwin is widely considered to be one of the finest writers and public intellectuals this country has ever produced. A brilliant novelist, essayist, and social critic, his explorations of homosexuality, racism, and class struggle in America have had a profound influence on the work of a generation of socially conscious

August 1, 2023, 7:41am Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel has been named as the latest recipient of the prestigious El Grand Balam award, a $150,000 prize awarded in three annual tranches and intended to support mid-career writers. The award, sometimes referred to as the “Borchard Prize,” is bestowed by the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Jabberwocky’ is one of the most beloved poems in the English language, perhaps not least because it does such interesting things with that language. A masterpiece of nonsense verse, ‘Jabberwocky’ actually addresses some very real issues and reflects some serious and important themes. Let’s take a closer look at

August 1, 2023, 10:43am The freshly announced “Booker’s dozen” of titles longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize is making its way around the literary internet, so let’s see what the morning tides have brought in. There are four debut novelists on the list, and Irish writers nabbed a record four out of the 13 nominations

July 31, 2023, 11:50am There’s no escape hatch from the current climate-deranged heat dome we live in quite like a goooooood fantasy novel or historical romp through the killing fields, a new ThriftBooks and OnePoll survey of 2,000 Americans has found. ThriftBooks asked respondents about how reading can change their mood, and about the types

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Here’s a quiz question for you. Who was the first high-profile writer to use the phrase ‘mad as a hatter’? How about we narrow it down a little more, and ask: which high-profile Victorian writer first used the phrase ‘mad as a hatter’? And let’s make it a little

July 31, 2023, 12:32pm Today marks the 79th anniversary of the disappearance of French writer, journalist, and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. On July 31, 1944, Saint-Exupéry took off in an unarmed P-38 on his ninth reconnaissance mission for the Free French Air Force from an airbase on Corsica, and never returned. His most famous work, The Little Prince,

TODAY: In 1848, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft elope to France.    “A small, vengeful man.” Masha Gessen chronicles how Vladimir Putin began his iron-fisted reign in Russia. | Lit Hub Politics A friendship for the ages: On the relationship between Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, two believers in American exceptionalism. | Lit

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) When is it a good idea to be nobody? There are some situations where it certainly pays to be Nobody, or rather, to claim to be ‘No One’. And one of the most famous episodes involving wily Odysseus (or Ulysses, as he was known to the Romans) bears this

July 28, 2023, 6:30am It’s just about the end of July, and that means many things: that you still have time for those vaunted summer fun or vacation plans, if you haven’t done them yet; that the cooler (and perhaps welcome after all these heatwaves) weather of fall is approaching; that that my birthday month

July 28, 2023, 12:55pm Sixty-nine (nice, but in Elvish) years ago this week, the godfather of high fantasy, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, published the first novel in a proposed thee-volume epic “largely concerned with hobbits.” The Fellowship of the Ring has, in the decades since publication, shifted over 150 million copies and spawned perhaps the most

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) A paean to drugs? Or alcohol? Or sex? Or the heady sensory experience of falling in love? Just what is the meaning behind ‘Diamonds’, one of Rihanna’s catchiest songs? ‘Diamonds’ is from Rihanna’s seventh studio album, Unapologetic (2012). If the song reminds you of another anthemic ballad from around

TODAY: In 1954, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring is published.   Poe vs. Himself: On Edgar Allan Poe’s one-sided war with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. | Lit Hub Biography Exploring the dreams of octopuses. | Lit Hub Animals How do we tell the stories of Picasso’s mistresses? Anne Boyd Rioux looks to the “weeping woman,” Dora Maar. | Lit Hub History

July 28, 2023, 1:49pm In the olden days, the popular crowd were devouring Pamela, and watching Marianne Dashwood getting teary over a sonnet (sense before sensibility)—the beginning of what became known as the “sentimental” novel, especially popular for and by among females in the 18th and 19th centuries, though traceable to 17th century poets. T.S.

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Silence of the Sirens’ is a very short story by Franz Kafka (1883-1924), written in 1917 but doomed, like so much of his work, to languish in his notebooks before being published after his death. This retelling of a famous myth from classical antiquity is idiosyncratic and worthy

July 28, 2023, 12:12pm Greenwich Entertainment has just released the first trailer for Swedish director Stig Björkman’s Joyce Carol Oates documentary, Joyce Carol Oates: A Body in the Service of Mind, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival all the way back in 2021. [embedded content] Narrated by Laura Dern (perfect choice), the documentary was 16 years