The Wife of Bath January 20, 2023 Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers—from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Read More
An excerpt from The Aesthetic Cold War January 17, 2023 In “Africa and Her Writers,” a feisty Chinua Achebe begins by proclaiming, “Art for art’s sake is just another piece of deodorized dog shit.” The joke, of course, comes at high modernism’s expense, and he was neither the first nor the last figure from decolonizing regions of the world to rail against writing for a privileged few. Read More
The Aesthetic Cold War January 04, 2023 How did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? Peter Kalliney explores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers. Read More
Daisy Hay on Dinner with Joseph Johnson January 01, 2023 Joseph Johnson was an extraordinary man, who brought together an extraordinary range of people. But Dinner with Joseph Johnson is not straightforwardly a biography of him—or even a book about him. Read More
What I mean by landscape orientation October 05, 2022 I entered without words: Poems has been described as “landscape oriented” in every sense. Originally a photographic term, now applied to a horizontal page, landscape orientation is, for me, a poetics. A poetics that begins by questioning the term “landscape” itself. Read More
Word watch September 12, 2022 Ever have the feeling that you should know something, but you don’t yet know what it is? But wait, if it is unknown to you, then how do you know that you should know it? Read More
Rediscovering Melville and Mumford August 22, 2022 The darkest times often feel unprecedented, but as almost any historian will tell you, they’re not. Read More
A student’s guide to a good-enough year August 18, 2022 As schools begin to stabilize from COVID-19 disruptions, the pressures that have long been accumulating on students show no signs of slowing. Employment uncertainties, rising financial burdens, and unrelenting competition have layered on top of decades of cultural messaging to persevere doggedly and push oneself beyond the limits to achieve excellence. Read More
Listen in: What Makes an Apple? July 05, 2022 In the last years of his life, the writer Amos Oz talked regularly with Shira Hadad, who worked closely with him as the editor of his final novel, Judas. These candid, uninhibited dialogues show a side of Oz that few ever saw. Read More
Seamus Heaney, pseudonym ‘Incertus’ June 13, 2022 When he first began to publish poems, Seamus Heaney’s chosen pseudonym was ‘Incertus’, meaning ‘not sure of himself’. Characteristically, this was a subtle irony. Read More
Why I hoard words June 09, 2022 I took an Old English module on a whim during my first year at university. I came across it at a foreign language informational session, and having never seen or heard Old English before, I was astonished to learn that my own mother tongue could be considered ‘foreign’ to me. Read More
Listen in: Translating Myself and Others June 01, 2022 Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages. Read More
The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English May 24, 2022 Old English is the language you think you know until you actually hear or see it. Unlike Shakespearean English or even Chaucer’s Middle English, Old English—the language of Beowulf—defies comprehension by untrained modern readers. Read More
Jhumpa Lahiri: Where I find myself May 16, 2022 Having written my novel Dove mi trovo in Italian, I was the first to doubt that it could transform into English. Naturally it could be translated; any text can, with greater or lesser degrees of success. Read More
Beyond The Dragon Daughter and Other Lin Lan Fairy Tales May 02, 2022 The lack of Chinese fairy tales in English translation has been a reality that hinders not only academic studies of the fairy tale, but also the cross-cultural understanding of Chinese traditions in general. Read More