literature

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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.

• 
• 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. 

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• SOURCE: Forward
  3/15/2020
  

  ‘The Plot Against America’ is Truer than even Philip Roth Knew

  by PJ Grisar

  Not that long ago, America welcomed its first Nazis.

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• 3/6/2020
  

  America’s First Literary Voice

  by William Lambers

  The thoughts and feelings of Anne Bradstreet, written hundreds of years ago, live on with us today. 

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• SOURCE: Perspectives on History
  3/4/2020
  

  Little Women: Greta Gerwig’s Love Letter to the 19th-Century Novel

  by Christine Jacobson

  It’s thrilling to see the historic Roberts Brothers publishing house richly imagined in the film’s first scene and to watch Jo spar with her editor over the rights to her novel and its ending.

• 
• 1/20/20
  

  George Orwell, 70 Years Later

  by John Rodden

  Would the visionary author of Nineteen Eighty-Four have ever imagined that George Orwell might become the most important writer since Shakespeare and the most influential writer who ever lived? 

• 
• 1/19/20
  

  Ross Douthat's Prescription for Academia Won't Solve the Real Problem

  by Ed Simon

  Humanities departments have shrunk, tenure track jobs have disappeared, and the academy has increasingly come to rely upon an exploited underclass of contingent, part-time faculty. The argument of who exactly is responsible for this state of affairs rages on, but New York Times columnist Ross Douthat insists he knows the answer.

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  1/10/20
  

  We’re living in the bizarre world that Flaubert envisioned

  by Susanna Lee

  Many might feel bewildered and demoralized. But fans of the 19th-century French novel have seen this before.

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• 1/12/20
  

  Can America Recapture Its Signature Exuberance?

  by Tracy Dahlby

  Walt Whitman understood transcendence of national mood is an uphill climb. Periods of division and strife sort new realities into a renovated sense of purpose. Yet periods of upheaval must necessarily lead to a refitting, not obliteration, of our common story or democracy is toast.

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• 12/1/19
  

  A Review of Amazon Prime’s Series Dostoevsky

  by Walter G. Moss

  Americans unfamiliar with Dostoevsky's life, and perhaps even with some of his greatest works like Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, can now get to know him via Amazon Prime’s 8-part subtitled series Dostoevsky, directed by the Russian Vladimir Khotinenko.

• 
• 5/19/19
  

  Anton Chekhov: Environmental Prophet for Our Planet

  by Walter G. Moss

  Like Netflix's documentary Our Planet, the Russian writer often displayed a deep love of nature in his hundreds of stories and plays.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  4/16/19
  

  Notre Dame was in ruins. Victor Hugo’s novel about a hunchback saved it.

  France has rebuilt its iconic cathedral before.

• 
• SOURCE: CNN
  4/13/19
  

  Shakespeare’s London Home Where He Wrote ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Identified by Historian

  Theater historian Geoffrey Marsh spent a decade meticulously researching the home of the English dramatist and poet by cross-referencing official records to pinpoint where exactly Shakespeare lived during the 1590s.

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• SOURCE: Time
  4/11/19
  

  Molly Shannon Wants You to Know the Truth About Emily Dickinson

  I think after Emily became a successful writer after her death, people were worried that if the public found out she loved women, the public who adored the old-maid-recluse story would stop reading her poetry.

• 
• SOURCE: USA Today
  3/24/19
  

  Tolkien Fans: Here's your chance to become part of J.R.R. Tolkien's oral history

  Each interview will be transcribed and available to search by keywords. Names will be kept private but ages and hometowns will be available.

• 
• 3/10/19
  

  Robinson Crusoe’s Wall

  by Geoffrey Sill

  We can look to history, especially literary and cultural history, to explain the passionate desire of many Americans to build a wall.

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• SOURCE: NY Times
  2/23/19
  

  Charles Dickens Tried to Banish His Wife to an Asylum, Letters Show

  “This is a stronger and more damning account of Dickens’s behavior than any other."

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• SOURCE: Literary Hub
  1/14/19
  

  A Brief History of Children's Literature: Nasty, Brutish, and Short

  by Jennifer Traig

  For most of history, authors have used their words to render children speechless.