Literature

June 13, 2023, 1:16pm Monday, June 12th, began with two literature-related tweets. One noted the replacement of newspapers in a bodega with a wall of Welch’s fruit gummies. “This says a lot about society,” went the tweet, which to be frank I don’t have a read on. The other was a video post from Elizabeth

The initial rush of deadline at the newspaper usually started to recede in the late afternoon, and that is when I set out for school. I headed down the corridor where Boston’s major hospitals were clustered, then cut across the wide manicured green lawn at the heart of Harvard Medical School. Before entering class, I

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) What does the word ‘sinister’ have to do with being left-handed? And what was the meaning of the word ‘ambidextrous’ when it was first coined? And what do these two questions have to do with each other? Let’s take a closer look at the interesting origins of the word

June 12, 2023, 9:32am Last week, Elizabeth Gilbert announced the forthcoming publication of The Snow Forest, a novel set in Siberia about a family who flee Soviet forces, escaping to the forest where they “protect nature against industrialization.” After an “overwhelming” response from the Ukrainian diaspora over the weekend, Gilbert announced on Twitter on Monday

A famous fellow British author, a Catholic no less, lived in Monaco, twenty miles from Greene’s apartment. Anthony Burgess and Graham Greene knew one another, yet seldom socialized. Still, Burgess remained a faithful acolyte to Greene’s high priest. He applauded Greene’s books in reviews and on TV talk shows and at literary festivals. Burgess dedicated

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Still I Rise’ is one of Maya Angelou’s best-loved and most widely studied poems. It’s an affirmative poem about the power of the self, as well as a poem which celebrates the speaker’s strength and her ability to overcome the prejudices and setbacks she has experienced in her life.

Anne Berest, the author of The Postcard—one of the most acclaimed and beloved French novels of recent years—came to Books & Books and dazzled a room full of readers. Let’s join those readers on this episode of The Literary Life. From the episode: Brenda Diaz de la Vega: There’s a precise date in the book:

TODAY: In 1870, Charles Dickens dies at 58.   “I felt that the real barrier between us was that between the cradle Catholic and the convert.” Why Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess went from literary friends to enemies. | Lit Hub Biography Between the river and the sea: Randall Sullivan on surviving a near-death experience on

‘The Bowl’ is not one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best-known short stories, but it is a notable work which deals with the themes of fame, football, and envy, among other things. Written in 1927 and published a year later in the Saturday Evening Post, ‘The Bowl’ is about a college football player who meets a

TODAY: In 1949, a Danish-born Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset dies at 67.   “Every novelist’s life has taken place during times of turmoil.” Jane Smiley considers how the essay and the novel inform each other. | Lit Hub Criticism Nick de Semlyen reveals the literary roots of Die Hard (yes, your favorite Christmas movie is based on a book). |

The Columbia River Bar is the violent meeting of the twelve-hundred-mile-long Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean, the site of over 2,000 shipwrecks. Thirty-three tributaries feed the Big River with rainwater in the ninety miles between the Willamette and the Pacific Ocean, and by late May and early June the flow of the lower Columbia

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Flying Machine’ is a 1953 short story by Ray Bradbury, included in his collection The Golden Apples of the Sun. Often analysed as an allegory for nuclear proliferation during the Cold War, ‘The Flying Machine’ is in fact a subtler story than this critique implies, and so its

June 9, 2023, 11:21am The trailer opens with Richard E. Grant growling that “great writers … steal” (Aaron Sorkin stole it first). There are dark slashes of cello in the nondiagetic that let us know The Lesson will be a dark film about a novelist. Do writers invent characters, or do they kill them and

June 8, 2023, 1:13pm Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. George Orwell’s dystopian masterwork, Nineteen Eight-Four, was first published seventy-four years ago today. Set in a totalitarian London in an imagined future where all citizens are subject to constant government surveillance and historical reeducation, Nineteen Eighty-Four tells

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Few songs of the 1960s, outside of The Beatles’ later output, has perhaps inspired more head-scratching than Procol Harum’s 1967 hit ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. Even the band’s name is likely to invite puzzled looks from people who first encounter it. Who, or what, is a ‘procol harum’?

June 8, 2023, 12:33pm Today in word news: Apple will finally stop autocorrecting swears! As many people have pointed out to me via the comment section of this website and also emails sent through my personal website (thanks, guys), I swear a lot, so this is great news for me. Although it’s easy enough to

June 7, 2023, 10:44am There was no prior announcement, but an assessment took place yesterday on the internet of our collective worth, a kind of Internet Speed Test for our souls. New Yorker writer Hannah Williams posted a screencap of Anne Carson’s 2017 POEM “Saturday Night As An Adult,” with the caption: “Think about this

What was the Trojan Horse? The Trojan Horse the hollow wooden horse in which Greek soldiers concealed themselves so they could enter Troy without arousing suspicion. The Trojan Horse was offered to the city of Troy as a gift, but when the Trojans took the wooden horse inside the city gates, the Greeks who had