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The Entire Manuscript Collection of Geoffrey Chaucer Gets Digitized: A New...
Earlier this year, Oxford professor of English literature Marion Turner published The Wife of Bath: A Biography. Even if you don’t know anything about that book’s subject, you’ve almost certainly...
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Hunter S. Thompson Sets His Christmas Tree on Fire, Nearly Burning His House...
It was something of a Christmas ritual at Hunter S. Thompson’s Colorado cabin, Owl Farm. Every year, his secretary Deborah Fuller would take down the Christmas tree and leave it on the front porch...
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The Great Gatsby Explained: How F. Scott Fitzgerald Indicted & Endorsed the...
When The Great Gatsby was first published, it flopped; nearly a century later, its place at the pinnacle of American literature is almost universally agreed upon. Of the objectors, many no doubt...
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Read Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World: The First Sci-Fi Novel Written...
For a variety of reasons, science fiction has long been regarded as a mostly male-oriented realm of literature. This is evidenced, in part, by the eagerness to celebrate particular works of sci-fi...
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The Russian Animators Who Have Spent 40 Years Animating Gogol’s “The Overcoat”
“Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret meaning worth the sudden...
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Watch a 1915 Film Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland Enhanced in 4K, with...
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland predates the invention of cinema by a couple of decades. Nevertheless, much like the “Drink me” bottle and “Eat me” presented to its young protagonist, Lewis Carroll’s...
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How Jane Austen Changed Fiction Forever
Though Jane Austen hasn’t published a novel since 1817 — with her death that same year being a reasonable excuse — her appeal as a literary brand remains practically unparalleled in its class. This...
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Frank Herbert Explains the Origins of Dune (1969)
Dune: Part Two has been playing in theaters for less than a week, but that’s more than enough time for its viewers to joke about the aptness of its title. For while it comes, of course, as the second...
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Behold Soviet Animations of Ray Bradbury Stories
Sergei Bondarchuk directed an 8‑hour film adaptation of War and Peace (1966–67), which ended up winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Picture. When he was in Los Angeles as a guest of honor at a party,...
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When François Truffaut Made a Film Adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit...
The protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a “fireman” tasked with incinerating what few books remain in a domestic-screen-dominated future society forced into illiteracy. Late in life, Ray...
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3,000 Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Complete Works from Victorian England,...
“We can say of Shakespeare,” wrote T.S. Eliot—in what may sound like the most backhanded of compliments from one writer to another—“that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great...
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Gertrude Stein Gets a Snarky Rejection Letter from a Publisher (1912)
Gertrude Stein considered herself an experimental writer and wrote what The Poetry Foundation calls “dense poems and fictions, often devoid of plot or dialogue,” with the result being that “commercial...
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Ernest Hemingway’s Advice to Aspiring, Young Writers (1935)
Here in the twenty-twenties, a hopeful young novelist might choose to enroll in one of a host of post-graduate programs, and — with luck — there find a willing and able mentor. Back in the...
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Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium: A Beautiful Digital Edition of the Poet’s...
So many writers have been gardeners and have written about gardens that it might be easier to make a list of those who didn’t. But even in this crowded company, Emily Dickinson stands out. She not...
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How the Year 2440 Was Imagined in a 1771 French Sci-Fi Novel
Many Americans might think of Rip Van Winkle as the first man to nod off and wake up in the distant future. But as often seems to have been the case in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the...
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