The Woman Behind Emma M. Lion
Beth Brower has been self-publishing for a decade. But her series drawn from the cheeky “journals” of a young woman in Victorian England has been a breakout.
Beth Brower has been self-publishing for a decade. But her series drawn from the cheeky “journals” of a young woman in Victorian England has been a breakout.
bird hunting My father staggers aheadwith a rifle strapped to his shoulder,the first snow still saltedin drifts of his hair.Cov noog tau mus tsev lawm,he says, but we trek furtherto places the wildfires have yet to claim.We passed a nest of robin eggscrushed beneath a giant silver maple,he gathers the speckled shellsinto his palms, fits […] The post The Dead Return Every Minnesota Winter appeared first on Electric Literature .
We are living in a golden age of pseudoscience. Here are three helpful tools for separating science from its imitator - by Aeon Video Watch on Aeon
In Jerusalem of the year 1229, there lived a Greek Orthodox monk named Johannes Myronas. Needing some parchment for a prayer book, he grabbed some already-used pages, erased their existing content, and over them wrote down “prayers for the dead, prayers for repentance, blessings for the loaves at Easter, and even a prayer for those […]
The pop star is curating the 2026 festival, which also features Patti Smith, Mustafa and Ta-Nehisi Coates, as part of the Southbank Centre’s anniversary year Zadie Smith, Patti Smith and Mustafa are among the star names lined up to be interviewed by Dua Lipa, as the pop star reveals her curation of this year’s London Literature festival at the Southbank Centre. The festival, now in its 19th year, will run from 21 October to 1 November, with the Brit award-winning singer shaping a programme of events in collaboration with her Service95 book club. Continue reading...
In this disorienting book, a poet argues we have been looking at nature – and ourselves – the wrong way The eastern breakwater of Granton harbour is almost 1km long, and swimmers can follow its crooked finger, heading straight out into the Firth of Forth, while benefiting from its reassuring presence. One Thursday lunchtime, I thought: why not, let’s give it a go, and headed for its tip. I felt cold, but, as I progressed, I seemed to grow strangely warmer. I did not notice the complaints from my body: the creeping numbness which proceeded from my fingers to my elbow, nor the coldness of my pee. Only by the time I exited the water, club footed and claw handed, did it hit me that I was hypothermic. The irony of this reckless exercise was that in my swim bag there was a book by Melanie Challenger called Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World. It’s an ambitious examination of the wisdom of bodies, a rhizomatic guide not just to our own, but also all the living forms around us: from bacteria to chimps. Her case is that we have ignored or misread the agency and purpose of bodies to our detriment; in a way it is a plea to listen to them. I wish I had read it before my ill-advised swim. Continue reading...
Image via Wikimedia Commons It’s been a humanist truism for some time to say that Shakespeare speaks to every age, transcending his time and place through the sheer force of his universal genius. But any honest student first encountering the plays will tell you differently, as will many a seasoned scholar who works hard to […]
This journey of discovery from the US to Sicily tackles urgent themes, but is increasingly inward-looking In Grace Paley’s short story A Conversation With My Father, a request is made of the Paley-like narrator. “I would like you to write a simple story just once more,” her father says, “the kind Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov … Just recognisable people and then write down what happened to them next.” Her attempt, and its failure to impress him, is the action that powers the story. Valeria Luiselli’s fourth novel is propelled by a similar request, the daughter of the Luiselli-like narrator asking: “Will you finally write a novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end?” It’s a problem Luiselli has addressed before. In her 2017 book-length essay about undocumented migrant children, Tell Me How It Ends, she writes that the difficulty in telling their story “is that it has no beginning, no middle and no end”. Beginning Middle End charts the narrator’s efforts to corral life into a narrative. The father in Paley’s story would be similarly unimpressed. After a “slow, entangled” divorce, the narrator, a Mexican living in the United States, embarks on a European book tour with her 12-year-old daughter. She has a coil removed in Munich; her daughter loses a tooth in Prague; near Amsterdam they watch children learning to swim with their shoes on in case of floods. When summer comes, the pair fly to Catania in Sicily. The narrator’s grandmother grew up nearby. They stay in the apartment of a pianist who’s away on tour, with whom the narrator had a “brief and feverish encounter” the previous year. Continue reading...
Big booksellers are taking different approaches to dealing with the deluge of titles generated by artificial intelligence.
"Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, / you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing."
The director's "by hand' approach to the restoration included forbidding the use of AI The post James Cameron to Guillermo del Toro on <i>Pan’s Labyrinth</i> 3D: “If You Take Less Than 300 Days, I’ll Kill You” appeared first on Reactor .
A girl journeys across the haunted Montana Territory to rescue her father from an otherworldly creature. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>The Unheld</i> by Luke Larkin appeared first on Reactor .
Colson Whitehead’s Harlem trilogy turns away from the pessimism of his recent novels to offer a more hopeful vision for Black history.
How science is trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. The post Reversing Rivers, Raising Louisiana, and Revamping Reefs: Elizabeth Kolbert’s <i>Under a White Sky</i> appeared first on Reactor .
Also among the 13 works up for the British literary award are the latest books from Douglas Stuart, Gwendoline Riley and Emma Cline.
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