Literature

May 5, 2023, 10:30am On Monday, at around 3PM (EST), from Columbia University in New York City, the winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction will be announced. As well as a check for a cool $15,000 dollars (which feels a little low, tbh), the victor (if there is to be one; see 2012)

May 4, 2023, 10:00am According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘At the ’Cadian Ball’ is an 1892 short story by the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904). The story is about two men and two women and their romantic involvements leading up to, during, and after the event known as the ’Cadian Ball, a social occasion at which young Cajun

May 4, 2023, 11:21am Respect and support to Wasilla, Alaska’s Black Birch Books, who’re getting a lot of online flack for announcing a drag story time in June. But despite a slew of negative, and sometimes threatening, comments and reviews, Black Birch owner Taylor Jordan is going on with the show. As she told Alaska

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘A pair of star-cross’d lovers’ is a well-known phrase from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The Prologue’s description of Romeo and Juliet as ‘star-cross’d lovers’ has become one of the most emblematic phrases from the whole play, neatly encapsulating the doomed nature of their love affair from the outset. But

May 3, 2023, 9:47am I love this. Legendary UK publisher Faber Editions has reissued Sven Holm’s 1967 dystopian classic, Termush, which is set at “a luxury hotel at the end of the world.” So why not set up a fake hotel website that looks real until you start reading the fine print? I, a philistine,

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ is probably Joni Mitchell’s best-known song. In many ways a song about not taking things for granted until it’s too late and we’ve lost them, it’s also an example of an environmental protest song. Mitchell wrote the song in 1970. ‘Big Yellow Taxi’: meaning The song

May 3, 2023, 10:00am According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Many notable short stories focus on the rough passage from childhood to adulthood. Of course, the transition from ‘child’ to ‘adult’ does not happen overnight, and is not the result of a single epiphany of crucial moment, but writers of short fiction often distil the development from innocence to

May 2, 2023, 10:00am According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The word stanza is derived from Italian: it literally means ‘room’, or ‘place for stopping or standing’. This Italian word was co-opted into English, and is now used to describe the arrangement of verse lines into a particular pattern, depending on how many lines there are and how they

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The fourth and last of the gospels which begin the New Testament, the Gospel of John is also the most unusual of the four. Whilst the other three gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke contain many overlapping details (and are known collectively, on account of these similarities, as the

May 2, 2023, 11:48am The 2023 Tony nominations are out and include the Jessica Chastain revival of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (also with Succession’s Arian Moayed), and your old friend Tom Stoppard. The nominations for best new play are: Ain’t No Mo’ by Jordan E. Cooper, about a world in which the U.S. government

May 2, 2023, 1:25pm Does Taika Waititi ever sleep? It seems like every other week brings news that the Oscar-winning New Zealander has attached himself to another Hollywood project. Time Bandits, Interior Chinatown, The Incal, Thor 6: OMGods, some Glup Shitto Star Wars nonsense…the list goes on. How does this man find the time, or the energy,

Centaurs are surely the most famous human-animal hybrids from classical mythology, along with the Minotaur. But what do centaurs represent? These creatures – part-human, part-horse – turn up in a number of different myths from antiquity, but the meaning of these stories, and what the centaurs symbolise, varies from tale to tale. The myth of

May 1, 2023, 4:55am It’s a new month, and that means, amongst other things, that a lot of wonderful, exciting, thought-provoking titles are finally being released in paperback. The titles below span a wide range, including authors old and new, established and promising. I hope you’ll find a few to add to your lists! *

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Happier Than Ever’, the title track from Billie Eilish’s second studio album released in 2021, has rapidly become one of her most talked-about tracks. But what is the meaning of this song, and whom is Eilish addressing in the lyrics? ‘Happier Than Ever’: song meaning Originally titled ‘Away from

“Don’t worry about the class. You just concentrate on getting well. The class will still be there when you come back.” Though this statement might read like an email from a kind faculty member to a student sick with COVID-19, it actually hails from a much more historically distant source: the hit television series Murder,