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[when faces called flowers float out of the ground] by e.e. cummings
Because we know you definitely need more titles on your TBR. Read the lists here.
Mashing up Jane Austen’s fiction with zombies, erotica, or extraterrestrials has become so common in pop culture that such stuff may no longer raise an eyebrow. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies was, and feels, so very ten years ago. But who could have known then that the most fresh, funny, and moving mash-up was yet to come—and that it would take menstruation as its most unlikely subject? Jane Austen’s Period Drama, Julia Aks and Steven Pinder’s Oscar-nominated (and brilliant) short live action film, turns on a clever pun on the word “period.” The 13-minute film—recently made available to viewers on YouTube—also captured headlines when Emma Thompson signed on as its “Executive Menstrual Adviser.” Jane Austen’s Period Drama has emerged as a serious contender for the Academy Award.
Devoney Looser explores 19th-century attitudes about menstruation through Jane Austen’s Period Drama, the Oscar-nominated short.
“Imagine a wealthy Oxbridge don giving their teenager a blank check for their Brontë birthday bash and you might begin to grasp the vision.” Emily Van Duyne reviews Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights.
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In our Letters from Minnesota series, writers, organizers, and activists on the ground in Minnesota bear witness to ICE and American authoritarianism. Today, read dispatches from Kao Kalia Yang on preparing for the worst with her children, Jim Moore on echoes of protests past, and Katherine Packert Burke on “why we will win.”
In our Letters from Minnesota series, writers, organizers, and activists on the ground in Minnesota bear witness to ICE and American authoritarianism. Today, read dispatches from Kao Kalia Yang on preparing for the worst with her children, Jim Moore on echoes of protests past, and Katherine Packert Burke on “why we will win.”
James Folta talks to Minneapolis bookseller Angela Schwesnedl:
“Angela Schwesnedl from Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis picked up my phone call on Saturday almost two hours to the minute after Alex Pretti was murdered in the street by ICE officers.
‘If you haven’t seen the video, don’t,’ she told me. ‘It’s an execution.’
We had made a plan the day before to talk about Friday’s huge ICE Out protest, march, and general strike against the federal occupation, but Alex Pretti was dead, and we began in somber sadness. The early reports of the murder would continue to filter out to us, to me hunched in a friend’s small office in New York while taking notes, and to her in the back of a Minneapolis store while managing diaper distribution.”
“We wear whistles now. Mine is bright yellow and plastic and weighs barely enough to dangle from its string. I carry it in my pocket. Others wear theirs like an amulet. Under any other circumstance, my whistle would be mistaken for a Christmas-tree ornament, a birthday-party favor, or a second-hand Fisher-Price toy. It looks amateur, but the noise it makes is contractor grade.
The neighbors all carry one. Some whistles are clearly brand-new—an overnight Amazon Prime purchase—others a leftover from a long-ago summer lifeguard job. In blaze-orange safety vests and down puffers, we line the streets around our schools each morning and afternoon, standing watch for ICE caravans, little plumes of frozen breath rising from beneath our hoods.”
Anne Margaret Castro explains why Heated Rivalry is the perfect romance novel adaptation.
This year at Literary Hub, we published the tenth iteration of a fan favorite end of year list: the best book covers of the year, as chosen by some of our favorite book cover designers. When we realized we had a decade of data about the best book covers, we knew what we needed to do. These are the 75 best ranked book covers of the decade, because we know you live for the aesthetic.
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William Butler Yeats is often taught through a handful of familiar poems, but beneath that canon was a lifelong engagement with mysticism, divination, symbolism, and systems of belief that shaped how he understood history and the creative imagination. A new JSTOR Daily article by Gus Mitchell traces how these ideas informed his poetry as central ways of thinking and learning about the world.
If you’re looking to start the year by reading something a little unexpected, this one’s worth your time! And if pieces like this are your kind of reading, the JSTOR Daily newsletter delivers stories grounded in scholarship straight to your inbox.
Image: William Rothenstein, William Butler Yeats, 1898. Lithograph. The Cleveland Museum of Art.