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How Chekhov invented the modern short story The Russian writer’s tales of stasis, uncertainty and irresolution determined the path of 20th-century fiction. By Chris Power New Statesman 25 August 2020 In a 1981 essay, Raymond Carver described some of the quotations taped to the wall around his desk. One had “this fragment of a story by Chekhov: ‘… and suddenly everything became clear to him’”. Fo..

The Disaster Poet On William McGonagall, the worst famous poet in the English language. By Matthew Sherrill Lapham's Quarterly Monday, August 17, 2020 Thunderstorm with the Death of Amelia, by William Williams, 1784. Photograph © Tate (CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0). It’s the rare story that’s equally familiar to both engineers and literature students: On December 28, 1879, a train was carrying passengers acr..

Stuck with Ezra Pound J. L. Wall NEH Aug 9, 2020 Cathay: A Critical Edition by Ezra Pound, Edited by Timothy Billings. Fordham University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 364 pages, $35. The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound by Daniel Swift. Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2017, Hardcover, 320 pages, $27. Reviewed by J. L. Wall What are we to do with Ezra Pound? One answer would be to “..

Dickens in Brooklyn Jay Neugeboren The New York Review of Books August 5, 2020, 7:00 am Jay Neugeboren The Neugeborens (the author second left), Brooklyn, circa 1945 My parents were married at six o’clock on Sunday evening, October 25, 1936, at the Quincy Manor in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, and a week or so later, they began clipping coupons from the front page of The New York P..

An Elegy for the Landline in Literature Mourning a device that gave fiction surprise, suspense, and uncertainty. By Sophie Haigney The New Yorker July 27, 2020 Illustration by Eiko Ojala “The telephone rang. It was an unusual hour for it to ring.” These two sentences are drawn from Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Symbols and Signs,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 1948. They are functionally..

Dickens and his demons How the novelist hid his cruel side – infidelity, bullying callousness, malice – in plain sight in his fiction. By Lyndall Gordon The NewStatesman 22 July 2020 The Mystery of Charles Dickens is a biography ready to take risks. Wading away from the shore – where the crowd laughs at comic turns and weeps at the pathos of orphans – AN Wilson takes six deep-sea dives in search..

Who wrote Wuthering Heights? A sometimes-vocal minority of amateur critics and enthusiasts continue to question if Emily Brontë did in fact write Wuthering Heights. Rachel McCarthy & James O’Sullivan The Irish Times Jul 16, 2020 Emily Brontë, best known for Wuthering Heights, which she wrote under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, painted by Patrick Branwell Brontë. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Imag..

Eliot the Enigmatic Matt Hanson The Anerican Interest July 12, 2020 A new collection of “The Essential T.S. Eliot” samples his poetic genius, but fails to meet the modern reader halfway. The Essential T.S. Eliot Selected and with an Introduction by Vijay Seshadri Ecco, 2020, 208 pp., $25.99 In a typically cranky letter to his best friend, the poet Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis had to get somethin..

What Is There to Love About Longfellow? He was the most revered poet of his day. It’s worth trying to figure out why. By James Marcus New Yorker June 1, 2020 After a century-old collapse, the poet’s reputation shows some signs of revival.Illustration by Carson Ellis On March 26, 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson went to a funeral. As the elderly writer stared into the open casket, he grew perplexed. He ..

Why T.S. Eliot still matters His contemporaries’ reputations have diminished. But Eliot’s has grown: he is the poet who shows us what can be saved from the ruins Douglas Murray Standpoint 22/05/2020 I remember the exact words with which I was first introduced to “The Waste Land” while still at school. “This isn’t a poem you read. It is a poem you will live with.” Everything in the years since ha..