Tag Archives: Literature

Arts & Literature, Books, Technology

Smartphone Books: The New York Public Library’s Interactive “Insta Novels”

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Insta Novels launched August 22, 2018 on the Library’s Instagram account (@nypl) with Part 1 of a newly digitized version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The novel is illustrated by well-known designer Magoz (@magoz).

The New York Public Library Insta Novels The Metamorphosis Franz Kafka

First, go to the Library’s Instagram account (@nypl) and tap Part 1 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in the Highlights section, right under the bio.

Rest your thumb on lower right part of the screen to hold the page, and lift your thumb to turn the page. (The lower right thumb holder is designed to double as a flip book: if you lift your thumb and let the pages flip, you’ll see an animation.)

As more stories are added, the NYPL Instagram account’s Highlights will turn into a digital bookshelf.

Arts & Literature, Interviews, Videos

Video Interviews: 58-Year Old Nobel Prize Author Olga Tokarczuk (2020)

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In this interview from the Nobel Banquet on 10 December 2019, Literature Laureate Olga Tokarczuk talks about her childhood dream of being a scientist, curiosity as motivation and the importance of translators.

Olga Tokarczuk, (born January 29, 1962, Sulechów, Poland), Polish writer who was known for her wry and complex novels that leap between centuries, places, perspectives, and mythologies. She received the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature (awarded belatedly in 2019), lauded for her “narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” A best-selling author in Poland for decades, Tokarczuk was not well known outside her homeland until she became the country’s first author to win the Man Booker International Prize in 2018 for Flights (2017)—the English translation of her sixth novel, Bieguni (2007).

From Encyclopedia Britannica

Arts & Literature, Books, Podcasts, Reviews

Art History Podcasts: “Understanding the Medieval World through Books” (Getty Museum)

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Getty Museum PodcastsWhat was the world like from 500 to 1500 CE? This period, often called medieval or the Middle Ages in European history, saw the rise and fall of empires and the expansion of cross-cultural exchange.

Getty curator Bryan C. Keene argues that illuminated manuscripts and decorated texts from Africa, Asia, Australasia, the Americas, and Europe are windows through which we can view the interconnected history of humanity. In this episode, he discusses his recent book Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts, highlighting the challenges and opportunities of the emerging discipline known as the Global Middle Ages.

Arts & Literature, Books, Literature, Profiles

Profiles: The “Stylish” Legacy Of British Author Hugo Charteris (1922-1970)

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From a New Criterion online article:

Hugo Charteris The LifelineAlan Ross, for forty years The London Magazine’s editor, found Charteris “one of the most original, quirky and shrewd explorers of the behaviour of the landed gentry . . . and at a time when prose was plain, his was idiosyncratically stylish.”

When Hugo Charteris’s first novel, the haunting A Share of the World, was published in 1953 to the praise of Rosamond Lehmann (who helped to get it published), Peter Quennell, Evelyn Waugh, and Francis Wyndham (Charteris’s relation and consistent supporter), the author, just turned thirty-one, seemed set for lasting fame. It hasn’t worked that way in the The New Criterion March 2020almost five decades since his death of cancer in 1970, aged only forty-seven.

Nowadays, few people seem to know his name. This is true among not only the ever-growing majority who pay little attention to novels and novelists, but also the enlightened minority who do.

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Arts & Literature, Books, Interviews, Videos

Tributes: CBS Interview From 1998 With Author Clive Cussler (1931-2020)

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Novelist Clive Cussler, the man whose maritime alter-ego, adventurer Dirk Pitt, raised the Titanic and explored countless shipwrecks, has himself located more than 60 sunken ships and submarines. Cussler (who died on February 24, 2020, at age 88) talked to correspondent Anthony Mason in this interview that originally aired on “Sunday Morning” on January 25, 1998, in which he discussed his passion for vintage cars, and for going beneath the ocean’s surface to find the answers to naval history’s perplexing questions.

Arts & Literature, Books, Fiction, History, Interviews

Inteviews: 67-Year Old British Author Hilary Mantel – “Extraordinarily Probable Fiction” (NYT)

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Excerpts from a New York Times interview (Feb 24, 2020):

Hilary Mantel by Ellie Smith for the New York Times
“All that time I was listening to the past, and now I’m almost talking for a living,” Mantel said, “and it feels very frivolous and empty compared to the stillness that there used to be in every day.”Credit…Ellie Smith for The New York Times

“Hilary has reset the historical patterns through the way in which she’s reimagined the man,” said Diarmaid MacCulloch, an Oxford theology professor who published a new Cromwell biography in 2018. “It’s fiction which is extraordinarily probable, and it’s remarkably like the Cromwell I’d been excavating myself.”

Hilary Mantel has a recurring anxiety dream that takes place in a library. She finds a book with some scrap of historical information she’s been seeking, but when she tries to read it, the words disintegrate before her eyes.

“And then when you wake up,” she said, “you’ve got the rhythm of a sentence in your head, but you don’t know what the sentence was.”

To an unusual degree for a novelist, Mantel feels bound by facts. That approach has made her latest project — a nearly 1,800-page trilogy about the 16th-century lawyer and fixer Thomas Cromwell — more complicated than anything she’s undertaken in her four decades of writing.

Read full interview article

Arts & Literature, Boats, Literature, News

Reading: New York Public Library Celebrates 125 Years With “125 Books List”

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New York Public Library logoThe New York Public Library is marking its 125th birthday this year—in part with this list of their favorite books written for adults from the past 125 years, which they hope will “inspire a lifelong love of reading.” 

New York Public Library Celebrates 125 Years with 125 Favorite Books List

New York Public Library Celebrates 125 Years with 125 Favorite Books List

See the full list here

Arts & Literature, Podcasts

Podcasts: Playwright David Rabe Reads Philip Roth (New Yorker)

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New Yorker FictionDavid Rabe joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “The Other Side of the Street,” by John Updike, which appeared in a 1991 issue of the magazine. 

Playwright David Rabe
Playwright David Rabe

Rabe, a fiction writer, playwright, and screenwriter, is the author of more than a dozen plays, including the Tony Award-winning “Sticks and Bones,” “In the Boom Boom Room,” and “Hurlyburly.” He received the PEN/Laura Pels Theatre Award as a Master American Dramatist in 2014. His novels include “Recital of the Dog” and “Girl by the Road at Night.” 

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Arts & Literature, Books, Literature, Videos

WWI Literature: A Reading Of “In Another Country” – Ernest Hemingway (1927)

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“In Another Country” is a poignant short story about the casualties of war, written by Noble Prize winner Ernest Hemingway, which deals with the experiences of an injured American army officer stranded and alienated in Italy who describes in first person narrative the events and the experiences of being rehabilitated during World War 1. It is a semi-autobiographical work of fiction.

In Another Country PDF

Summary (Wikipedia)

The short story is about an ambulance corps member in Milan during World War I. Although unnamed, he is assumed to be Nick Adams, a character Hemingway made to represent himself. He has an injured knee and visits a hospital daily for rehabilitation. There the “machines” are used to speed the healing, with the doctors making much of the miraculous new technology. They show pictures to the wounded of injuries like theirs healed by the machines, but the war-hardened soldiers are portrayed as skeptical, perhaps justifiably so.

As the narrator walks through the streets with fellow soldiers, the townspeople hate them openly because they are officers. Their oasis from this treatment is Cafe Cova, where the waitresses are very patriotic.

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