Literature

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Can’t Get You out of My Head’ is one of Kylie Minogue’s best-known and most-played tracks. Taken from the 2001 album Fever, it’s a dancefloor classic and its release as a single, just three days before 9/11 back in September 2001, was accompanied by one of Kylie’s most popular

The following is from Yan Ge’s Elsewhere: Stories. Ge was born in Sichuan, China. She is a fiction writer in both Chinese and English, and is the author of thirteen books in Chinese, including five novels. The first of her Chinese-language novels to be translated and released in the US, Strange Beasts of China, was

TODAY: In 1947, Lydia Davis is born.   How J. Robert Oppenheimer used one of his favorite books, the Bhagavad Gita, to make the most consequential decision of the 20th century. | Lit Hub History Truman Capote became the “it” author of his generation after publishing In Cold Blood. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing. | Lit Hub Biography C.K. Chau considers the importance

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Waiting’ is a 1950 short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Alternatively known as ‘The Wait’, the story is about an unnamed man who flees to Buenos Aires who escape his enemy, a gangster named Villari. The story focuses on the man’s time spent waiting

July 14, 2023, 11:51am Seventy-two years ago this week, The Catcher in the Rye first hit bookshelves across the US, and people still have some pretty strong opinions about J. D. Salinger’s groundbreaking debut. Die-hard fans and rabid haters are legion. Indeed, of all the mid-century American novels to stand the test of time, perhaps

TODAY: In 1904, Anton Chekhov dies at 44 of tuberculosis.     Steve Edwards reflects on teaching Brian Doyle’s “Leap” to the post-9/11 generation: “When I read it now, I am every bit as chastened as when I first read it. But something has changed for my students.” | Lit Hub Teaching How the machinery of social

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Marionettes, Inc.’ is a 1949 short story by the American writer Ray Bradbury (1920-2012). The story was reprinted in Bradbury’s 1952 collection The Illustrated Man. It concerns a company which can manufacture lifelike plastic doubles of people; these ‘marionettes’ can then stand in for the person they resemble while

July 13, 2023, 12:46pm Another day, another article about how the unstoppable forces of wokeness are coming for your kids. This time, via an article in The Federalist with the snappy headline “A Woke Children’s Literature Cabal Is Conditioning Your Kid To Be An Obedient Leftist.” TL;DR: Remember the good old days, when kids’ books taught important

TODAY: In 2014, South African writer and political activist Nadine Gordimer, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, dies at 90.      “It doesn’t matter if you’re worthy of doing it. It matters that it’s worthy of doing.” Amy Rowland on writing about rural America. | Lit Hub On Marianne Faithfull, one of the women

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘True’ is Spandau Ballet’s signature song. But what is the actual meaning of this pop-soul ballad which topped the UK charts in 1983? The song has its roots in Gary Kemp’s feelings about the lead singer of another 80s band, while aspects of the lyrics and melody pay tribute

July 12, 2023, 12:13pm PBS is at it again! Premiering on July 18th, Southern Storytellers is a three-episode docuseries aimed to “reveal Southern culture in its diversity and complexity” by “follow[ing] some of the region’s most compelling and influential contemporary creators to the places they call home.” Among other creatives in the worlds of music, TV, and film,

TODAY: In 1918, Doris Grumbach, writer, critic, and literary editor of The New Republic for several years, is born.     Also on Lit Hub: On loving and fictionalizing Ruth Bader Ginsburg • Andrew Ridker on writing about the recent past • Read from Maud Ventura’s newly translated novel, My Husband (tr. Emma Ramadan)

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The peace which passeth understanding’ has become a well-known biblical phrase, and it originates in a couple of verses found in St. Paul’s epistle to the Philippians. In Philippians 4:6-7, we read: Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests

July 11, 2023, 1:48pm Sixty-three years ago today, a young Alabama writer by the name of Nelle Harper Lee published her debut novel: a Southern Gothic-adjacent bildungsroman about racial injustice and familial love in the American South. In the months leading up to publication, Lee’s editors at Lippincott were keen to manage expectations, telling the

July 11, 2023, 7:58am It’s another Tuesday in a sweltering July, and for those of us trying to beat the heat—especially the chthonic, oven-like warmth of New York’s subway tunnels—finding somewhere cool can feel almost transcendentally delightful. What makes a cool place even lovelier? A new book, of course, and today, there are many exciting

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’, which was originally published in the British version of Vogue magazine, is a 1979 short story by Angela Carter (1940-92). The story was later collected in Carter’s 1979 book The Bloody Chamber. Like most of the stories in The Bloody Chamber, ‘The Courtship of

July 10, 2023, 3:18pm This fall, hundreds of books owned by Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts will go up for auction at legendary London auction house Christie’s. In case you didn’t know (I didn’t), Watts, who died in 2021 at the age of 80, was a devoted bibliophile and collector; Christie’s describes the cache, which

It’s 1965. Truman Capote was a known figure on the literary scene and a member of the global social jet set. His bestselling books Other Voices, Other Rooms and Breakfast at Tiffany’s had made him a literary favorite. And after five years of painstaking research, and gut-wrenching personal investment, part I of In Cold Blood