Literature

April 11, 2023, 11:59am It’s technically been spring for a few weeks now, but here in the Northeast, it’s finally feeling like it. Daffodils are blooming, the grass is growing, and the sun is slowly returning my will to live. Three years ago around this time, I wrote about the best rain in literature, but

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) With their 1982 album Toto IV, Toto scored a string of hits which continue to enjoy regular radio airtime and a popular fanbase: ‘Rosanna’ was one, and ‘I Won’t Hold You Back’ (memorably sampled by Roger Sanchez for his 2001 dance hit ‘Another Chance’) was another. But the success

April 10, 2023, 10:39am We have ceded more terrain to the robots. A ToolTester survey found that people surveyed in late 2023, 53% incorrectly identified AI-generated writing as human-made; a figure that rose to 63.5% when the technology was more advanced (GPT-4). So, not only will robots be able to hunt us down with lasers,

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Slant rhyme, also known as half-rhyme or pararhyme, is a kind of halfway house between full rhyme and no rhyme. So for instance, if we call cat and mat full rhyme, and cat and book are not rhymes of any kind, what can we call cat and coat, or

April 10, 2023, 11:00am What are the greatest history pop songs of all time?  I decided to make a playlist and collect them; it’s a playlist for my forthcoming book, The World: A Family History of Humanity. History books do not usually have soundtracks, but music plays a huge part in the book—it stars not

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) A simile is a literary device whereby you liken one thing to another, using the word like or as. Sometimes we use similes in everyday language: describing someone as being as sick as a parrot, for instance. But sometimes a poet finds a simile too weak for their purposes.

A light breeze salted the Brighton seafront when the taxi carrying Patrick Magee pulled up outside the Grand Hotel.  The driver opened the boot and gave a cheerful warning to the porter who reached for the case. “You’d better hold onto your nuts for this one, you’ll need ’em.”  It was just after noon on

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Although the pigs Snowball and Napoleon are far better-known, several other pigs play important roles in Animal Farm, George Orwell’s 1945 fable about Soviet Russia. Orwell’s novel satirises the way the ideals of the Russian Revolution of 1917 were subsequently betrayed, especially under Josef Stalin. And the October Revolution

Join Literary Hub at Film Forum on Saturday, April 15th at 6:50 p.m. ET, where we’ll be co-presenting a screening of the new film Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, based on seven Murakami short stories. Lit Hub film writer Olivia Rutigliano will moderate a Q&A with filmmaker Pierre Földes. Get up to two discounted $11 tickets

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Excellent’ is such a common word, and we so often want a word that describes something that is really good: a good performance, a fine meal, a splendid person, and so on. And ‘excellent’ is the word people often reach for. But this post is all about trying to

TODAY: In 1887, Gabriela Mistral, the first Spanish American author to receive the Nobel Prize in literature, is born.   She “carried the whiff of doom from the play’s very first moment.” How Cate Blanchett captured Tennessee Williams’s greatest character, Blanche duBois, in a unique production of A Streetcar Named Desire. | Lit Hub Theater Why

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The word ‘gaslighting’ has become an everyday term in the last few years, so a few words about its curious origins – and the precise meaning of the word – may be helpful (or, indeed, illuminating). The story of the word ‘gaslighting’ takes us into the world of 1940s

TODAY: In 1928, the fourth and final section of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury takes place.   Daniel M. Lavery on doling advice to strangers as Dear Prudence: “An unexpected benefit of this assembly-line approach to offering advice is that one’s own judgment becomes cheap.” | Lit Hub “I think that women must write

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’ is one of Philip K. Dick’s best-known short stories. Perhaps only ‘The Minority Report’ (which, like ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’, was adapted for the big screen) is more famous. The story was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy

April 7, 2023, 10:00am Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel, Let Us Descend, “a haunting masterpiece about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War,” which will be published by Scribner this October. “In each book since my second novel, there has

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) John 3:16 is one of the most famous and oft-quoted verses in the whole of the New Testament. Indeed, biblical scholars often view John 3:16 as the epitome of the whole gospel: this is the word the nineteenth-century scholar Alvah Hovey used to sum up the central importance of

April 7, 2023, 11:20am In the latest legal reporting on Kanye West’s “Donda Academy,” a $15,000-a-year private school, I was reminded of Homer Simpson’s failed religion. Most charter schools/religions fail, though the details of West’s academy seem more damning than the usual bespoke curriculum gone wild. Cecilia Hailey, a former employee and experienced school administrator,

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The writer O. Henry was a prolific author of short stories, and a number of them are still widely taught in schools and colleges; his brief tales with their surprising twist endings are still read and enjoyed by people around the world. But who was O. Henry? Was that