December 2017 – Encyclopedia of World Literature

Lit Hub Daily: December 4, 2020
“Reading Ferrante reminds us that personhood is inherently fluid, blurred, and unstable, that the solidifying process of most fiction is a consoling myth.” Pamela Erens on the “secret engine” that powers Elena Ferrante’s work—and may be why men rarely read her. | VQR “He was chronicling not just a century but a past and future […]
The Hidden Literary Heritage of Harriet the Spy
In 1963 and 1964, as Louise Fitzhugh was inventing Harriet the Spy’s world, nannies and spies were very much in the public eye. Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music were in the movie theaters. John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Ian Fleming’s James Bond books were leading hardcover […]
On Loneliness and the Superficial Friendships of Men
The first time it happened, it was during the empty space, what Paul calls the “vacuum crisis.” One winter night about 12 years ago, the then-48-year-old was alone in his apartment, biding the hours between dinner and bedtime with his usual domestic chores, which distracted him from the struggles he’d endured over the past year. […]
Who Gets to Be a Sympathetic Character in The Undoing?
Rarely have I encountered a character more obviously fated to become a murder victim than in The Undoing, HBO’s new six-part miniseries. This doomed person is Elena Alves, the mother of a scholarship student at an elite Manhattan prep school—the kind of outsider who, in the first episode, brings her newborn baby to a fundraising […]
Lessons in Humility From Teaching in the Mojave Desert
During your first year of teaching, a plague of grasshoppers invades the Mojave Desert. When you walk from the mobile home classroom where you teach an unruly crew of seventh grade language arts students and cross the black tarmac of the basketball courts, dead grasshoppers crunch under your loafers. You watch in dismay as one […]

Month: December 2017

“Insomnia”, TAHAR BEN JELLOUN.

Gonzalo Aurelio Esteva y Landero

James Joyce

10 modern Arab writers who are proving that Arabic still matters

The 10 Best Writers From Modern Turkey

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