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literature

  • SOURCE: The Guardian
    12/7/2021

    Orwell Estate Approves Feminist Retelling of "1984"

    "Orwell’s estate said it had been “looking for some time” for an author to tell the story of Smith’s lover, and that [Sandra] Newman, who has previously been longlisted for the Women’s prize and shortlisted for the Guardian first book award, 'proved to be the perfect fit'."

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    11/9/2021

    Emerson Never Practiced the Self-Reliance He Preached

    by Mark Greif

    Historian Robert A. Gross's new "The Transcendentalists and Their World" sets the famous experiments in living of Emerson and Thoreau in the social context of the town of Concord, through which the writers understood the shocks of modernization. 

  • SOURCE: CNN
    9/28/2021

    Why I Hope My Kids Never Read Roald Dahl

    by David M. Perry

    "The Dahl family has apologized for Roald Dahl's anti-Semitism, but the question remains, for readers and viewers, for TV producers and writers: what might it mean to eat the fruit from this poisoned tree?"

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    9/22/2021

    Climate Anxiety and the Return of Arctic Horror

    by Bathsheba Demuth

    As climate change driven by capitalism threatens the polar ice caps, new miniseries return to the themes of arctic exploration, where cold and ice threaten humans and commerce, rather than the other way around. 

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    9/13/2021

    Is this the Moment for Dante's Purgatory?

    by Judith Thurman

    Dante's epic examined the uncharted space of the new Catholic doctrine of Purgatory. New translations make his vision speak to today's mood of unsettlement and uncertainty.

  • SOURCE: The Conversation
    9/7/2021

    Giving the Women of the Divine Comedy their Due

    by Laura Ingallinella

    One scholar's project is using Wikipedia and her students to recover the historical personhood of Dante's women and elevate them above literary symbols or caricatures. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    9/7/2021

    Toni Morrison's Vision of Justice Was an Ethos of Care

    by Farah Jasmine Griffin

    "What does justice look like for centuries of systemic abuse and violence enacted by a society built upon withholding justice from Black people? In all of her novels Toni Morrison contemplates the nature and practice of justice."

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    8/23/2021

    Simone de Beauvoir's Lost Novel of Early Love

    “I loved Zaza with an intensity which could not be accounted for by any established set of rules and conventions,” Beauvoir recalled in her memoirs, almost thirty years after her friend’s death. 

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    7/14/2021

    Jenny Erpenbeck Is Keeping Time

    German author Jenny Erpenbeck's work is an exercise in preserving the objects that place a person's memory in history, particularly her own childhood in East Germany. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    6/1/2021

    The Push to Preserve Where Wilde Was Jailed for Being Gay

    The local council in Reading has been thus far rebuffed in its efforts to purchase Reading Jail, the site of Oscar Wilde's incarceration for "gross indecency," to make it publicly accessible as a historical monument. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    5/25/2021

    A Lost Brontë Library Surfaces

    "A trove of Brontë family manuscripts — all but unseen for a century — will be auctioned by Sotheby’s as part of what the auction house is billing as the sale of a legendary “lost library” of British literature treasures."

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    5/6/2021

    The Epic Journey to ‘The Underground Railroad’

    Director Barry Jenkins struggled with the ethical implications of making entertainment out of the brutal events narrated in Colson Whitehead's novel "Underground Railroad." He discusses how he decided to go ahead with the miniseries adaptation anyway. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic

    If the Author Is a Bad Person, Does That Change Anything?

    by Judith Shulevitz

    "Roth had baggage in all domains of life, and Bailey, an eager bellhop, carries the whole load for him—the unhappy marriages and contentious divorces and relationships and affairs and everything else as well."