Bob Dylan’s rowdy ways and American voice September 25, 2020 One of the great ironies surrounding Bob Dylan’s 2016 reception of the Nobel Prize for Literature is that, at the time of the prize, the great songwriter had just released a pair of recordings that featured no compositions of his own. Read More
Roy Foster | On Seamus Heaney September 10, 2020 The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. Read More
Listen in: Finding humanity through fairy tales July 14, 2020 Ever since I began a collaboration with Princeton University Press in 2008 to found the Oddly Modern Fairy Tales series, almost all the books we have published have been somewhat political but not didactic. Read More
Be Enchanted July 01, 2020 The imaginative and often dangerous world of fairy tales spins common human experience in a way that feels strangely vital. Read More
Erica McAlpine on The Poet’s Mistake June 17, 2020 Keats mixed up Cortez and Balboa. Heaney misremembered the name of one of Wordsworth’s lakes. Poetry—even by the greats—is rife with mistakes. Read More
Listen in: Lives of Houses May 05, 2020 What can a house tell us about the person who lives there? Do we shape the buildings we live in, or are we formed by the places we call home? And why are we especially fascinated by the houses of the famous and often long-dead? Read More
By Design | Oddly Modern Fairy Tales April 24, 2020 Fairy tales exert a keen influence on the collective imagination. By turns entertaining and frightening, didactic and illuminating, they are the stuff of dreams, but also of reality. Read More
Reading Callimachus through comics April 17, 2020 Comics and illustration—siblings or cousins, related in so many ways—are deeply hybrid art forms. Read More
“Canzone d’aprile” by Giovanni Pascoli April 06, 2020 The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation embraces a wide geographic and temporal range, from the Tang dynasty to modern-day Europe, from Latin America to the subcontinent of India. Read More
Poems from Szilárd Borbély’s Final Matters April 03, 2020 Szilárd Borbély, one of the most celebrated writers to emerge from post-Communist Hungary, received numerous literary awards in his native country. In this volume, acclaimed translator Ottilie Mulzet reveals the full range and force of Borbély’s verse by bringing together generous selections from his last two books, Final Matters and To the Body. Read More
In Dialogue with Kathleen Graber and Eleanor Wilner: The ethical aspirations of poetry April 02, 2020 Throughout history, poets have rallied against autocracies, served as moral beacons in times of crisis, while others have intentionally avoided moral absolutes. We asked poets Kathleen Graber and Eleanor Wilner what ethical or moral aspirations and obligations they hope their own poems embody or enact. Read More
Where poems may exist, now April 01, 2020 In the building across from mine, inside the top-center window, an American flag hangs vertically. I see it every day, every morning. My desk faces it. I face it. Read More
Nadia Nurhussein on Black Land February 10, 2020 As the only African nation, with the exception of Liberia, to remain independent during the colonization of the continent, Ethiopia has long held significance for and captivated the imaginations of African Americans. Read More
Donald and Winston at the Ministry of Alternative Facts January 31, 2020 Is George Orwell the most influential writer who ever lived? Yes, according to John Rodden’s provocative book about the transformation of a man into a myth. Read More
Marion Turner on Chaucer: A European Life December 02, 2019 More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life—yet his poems are anything but conventional. Read More
