literature

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• 10/25/2020
  

  Reading Pope Francis's "Fratelli Tutti" through Carl Sandburg

  by Walter G. Moss

  The latest encyclical by Pope Francis, calling for recognition of the unity of humanity, echoes the egalitarian humanism of the poet and writer Carl Sandburg.

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• SOURCE: TomDispatch
  10/22/2020
  

  Sending Trump to Hell

  by Ariel Dorfman

  How would the earthly transgressions of Donald Trump fit into the schema of eternal punishment Dante described? 

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  10/19/2020
  

  How Saidiya Hartman Retells the History of Black Life

  The literary scholar Saidiya Hartman's studies of the aftermath of slavery and the African diaspora point to the limits of archival records for understanding historical Black experience. Some historians question whether her methods fill archival gaps too creatively.

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• SOURCE: Paris Review
  10/5/2020
  

  Memory Haunts: John Edgar Wideman's Fictionalized Account of the 1985 MOVE Bombing

  by Imani Perry

  Wideman's account of events leading to the bombing of MOVE by Philadelphia police "is not just a map of the city but of the nation and our collective condition."

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  10/6/2020
  

  John Steinbeck, Bard of the American Worker (Review)

  Hailing him as a “major figure in American literature,” Souder further claims Steinbeck has “given the world several books that would last forever.”

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• SOURCE: BBC
  9/25/2020
  

  Rimbaud and Verlaine: France Agonises over Digging up Gay Poets

  While advocates see reinterrment at the National Mausoleum as a recognition of gay contributors to French literary history, some opponents suggest the iconoclastic poets would have rejected any such honor. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/11/2020
  

  Stories of Then That Still Hold Up Now

  Margaret Atwood, Héctor Tobar, Thomas Mallon and Brenda Wineapple on older political novels they admire that have a lot to say about the world today.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/15/2020
  

  Talks Underway to Move Ashes of writer Dorothy Parker out of Baltimore

  What would the oft-quoted Parker say about yet another resting place? One can almost hear her. What fresh hell is this?

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• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  7/14/2020
  

  When Plague Is Not a Metaphor

  by Hunter Gardner

  It's not always a blessing when current events make a researcher's specialty suddenly and urgently relevant. 

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• 6/28/2020
  

  “A Very Different Story”: Marian Sims and Reconstruction

  by David B. Parker

  Marian Sims's 1942 historical novel Beyond Surrender was not nearly as popular as Gone with the Wind. But it reminds us today of a history that might have been--both during Reconstruction and in the popular portrayal of the period.

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• 6/30/2020
  

  Pawns of History: The Poetics of Russian Revolutionary Politics

  by Tim Brinkhof

  The repression of political dissent in Czarist Russia led many future revolutionaries to literature as a gateway to political thought; their poetic idealism may have made them both effective and dangerous.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  6/18/2020
  

  The Black Women Who Launched the Original Anti-Racist Reading List

  by Ashley Dennis

  Black women librarians have been important leaders in promoting books and publishing standards that encourage readers to recognize human dignity and reject racist stereotypes in children's literature.

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  6/15/2020
  

  How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?

  She has become an icon of American letters. Now readers are reckoning with another side of her legacy.

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• SOURCE: Slate
  5/3/2020
  

  The 1918 Flu Pandemic Killed Millions. So Why Does Its Cultural Memory Feel So Faint?

  by Rebecca Onion

  According to scholar Elizabeth Outka, the tragedy haunts modernist literature between the lines.

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• SOURCE: The Nation
  4/13/2020
  

  The Tangled History of Illness and Idiocy

  by Jessi Jezewska Stevens

  Opining in public on things you don’t really understand is a form of idiocy in which Americans, in particular, are known to indulge.

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• 4/12/2020
  

  Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and the Year of COVID-19

  by Frank Palmeri

  Defoe's accomplishment as a work of history lies not so much in the accuracy of its numbers or facts as in its power as a work of fiction, in the observing eye and skeptical intelligence of H.F., and in the stories he tells, which convey through common language and the details of common life what it was like to live through the plague. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  3/30/2020
  

  Penguin Classics and Others Work to Diversify Offerings From the Canon

  Across the industry, publishers are releasing titles by authors who were previously marginalized or entirely lost to history.

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• SOURCE: Duluth News Tribune
  3/29/2020
  

  Author of 'The Lynchings in Duluth' Broke Silence on City's Dark History

  Michael Fedo's 40-plus year old account of the public murders of Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie is credited as the first complete resource on the events of June 15, 1920.

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  3/23/2020
  

  What Our Contagion Fables Are Really About

  by Jill Lepore

  In the literature of pestilence, the greatest threat isn’t the loss of human life but the loss of what makes us human.

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• SOURCE: New York Times Book Review
  3/17/2020
  

  A Stirring Family Saga Tells a Taboo History of Vietnam

  by Gaiutra Bahadur

  Americans may not know that literature has been doing history’s job with brutal episodes in Vietnam’s past.