Literary

The award-winning novelist and social critic Marilynne Robinson has turned the focus of her literary intelligence on to the first book of the Bible. Genesis, the foundational imaginative text of western culture, has permeated our art and literature, as well as shaping a whole understanding of life, including politics. Its stories remain at once compelling and mystifying. Some of the stories, most obviously that of a great flood, resemble others from Mesopotamia, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish, but…

At the 11th edition of the Galle Literary Festival (GLF), Booker Prize-winning author Shehan Karunatilaka hosted an elaborate gourmet dinner and arrack-tasting session at the Jetwing Lighthouse hotel’s Nihal’s restaurant. There, he read his prose poem, Arrack Attack — a 10-point primer on the virtues (and vices) of the distilled alcoholic drink made from the fermented sap of coconut flowers — and some passages from his first novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew. The Commonwealth Prize-winning book is rich with…

Oscar Wilde always imposed. Meeting him in 1892, the French writer Jules Renard reported: “He offers you a cigarette, but selects it himself. He does not walk around a table: he moves the table out of the way … He is enormous, and carries an enormous cane.” The affectations of dress and manner; the extraordinary, magnetic talk; the flourished epigrams; the startling, needling essays, stories and plays – all these were impositions. They were how Wilde forced himself on the attention of the world, made himself notorious,…

“I just think we should really be listening to Black voices right now,” says a white jury member during the debate for a prestigious literary prize, in a pivotal scene in Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction. The irony is that she and the other white jurors have just brushed aside the opinions of the two Black writers on the jury; the unspoken caveat is that the gatekeepers of American literature are happy to tune into Black voices, but only as long as they are saying the right thing. It’s a toe-curling depiction of…

Some of the classic lines from literature that talk to a world reeling from coronavirus outbreak. Take a look... Some of the classic lines from literature that talk to a world reeling from coronavirus outbreak. Take a look... FOLLOW US ON GOOGLE NEWS Read original article here Denial of responsibility! Techno Blender is an automatic aggregator of the all world’s media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, all materials to their…

In the melee of people around me was a slim sari-clad lady. We walked past each other, two strangers in the crowded corridors of the Jaipur Literature Festival at Diggi Palace. The literary agent looked serious, with a determined expression.Later, when I read her food memoir, I found her sternness tempered with a love of hospitality. An English Literature graduate from Lady Shri Ram College, the youngest of three sisters, married for love into a Jaipur-based joint family, fulfilling everything expected from her and doing…

Memes are, essentially, ideas, attitudes, jokes, and images that we share with other people. So the more something is shared, the more successful it is at being a meme, by definition.In our experience, there are a few main things that elevate a meme from something ‘meh’ to a viral sensation. It all comes down to relatability, humor, format, and consistency. Something that the SparkNotes team members in charge of creating and sharing all of these memes do so well is that they know their audience. It’s people who enjoy…

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1 DecemberThe Corrections by Jonathan FranzenAll Enid Lambert wants is everyone home for one last Christmas. Her husband, Alfred, is rapidly deteriorating with Parkinson’s. And so her three adult children – banker Gary, wannabe writer Chip and celebrity chef Denise – dutifully make their way from Philadelphia, Lithuania and New York up the snow-lined path of their parents’ house in St Jude. They manage breakfast together on the day itself. “This is the best Christmas present I’ve ever had,” poor Enid exclaims. A sabotaged…

In her Reith lecture of 2017, recently published for the first time in a posthumous collection of nonfiction, A Memoir of My Former Self, Hilary Mantel recalled the beginnings of her career as a novelist. It was the 1970s. “In those days historical fiction wasn’t respectable or respected,” she recalled. “It meant historical romance. If you read a brilliant novel like I, Claudius, you didn’t taint it with the genre label, you just thought of it as literature. So, I was shy about naming what I was doing. All the same, I…