Reading is a pleasure. And watching someone else read, too.
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Reading is “sexy”. Maybe it’s because watching someone read exerts a fascination on the beholder, be it St. Ambrose or Marilyn Monroe.
Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s adaptation of The Birds.
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Rereading du Maurier’s story of relentless devastation shows how the writer anticipated some of our most pressing environmental concerns.
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There were around 5,000 black Georgians and more black Victorians so black Dickens characters are historically feasible.
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The late writer never shied away from hard topics, breaking down walls of silence around topics like disability and rurality in post-war Japan.
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Edwina Preston pays tribute to the humble letter: from literary love letters to philosophical lessons to cherished family heirlooms. Letters impart lessons, reveal character – and are a form of art.
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An uncompromising writer who wrote about the dark and light of postwar Japan
A statue of Franz Kafka by the sculptor Jaroslav Róna in Prague, Czech Republic, inspired by Kafka’s short story “Description of a Struggle.”
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Franz Kafka was not well known during his lifetime, but his legacy provides a useful and necessary way to confront the current state of global affairs.
Research has shown that the UK read more during the pandemic.
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Many established poets published lockdown poems offering their perspective on the power of poetry to make sense of the pandemic.
Goosebumps are the latest children’s classics to be embroiled in the revisions controversy.
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Sensitivity edits benefit copyright holders, who wish to keep less tasteful elements of the works they control out of the public eye.
Stories about witches are having a resurgence.
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These new witches are rarely comparable to traditional dirty hags. The new witch is often beautiful, at once dark, gothic, ethereal and wild.
Odoacer (left) and Theoderic (right) in a woodcut from the Hartmann Schedel (1493).
INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo
Here, possibly four centuries before women are given a significant voice in heroic poetry in Germany and Scandinavia, a queen speaks out in an English version of a Gothic story.
Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel ‘Purple Hibiscus’ intersperses Igbo words and expressions.
(Rolf Vennenbernd/Pool Photo via AP)
Polyglot texts — texts that use many languages — have become increasingly common as writers document struggles between regimes of European hegemony and decolonizing movements.
Puffin are releasing versions of Dahl’s books that have undergone sensitivity edits.
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Abridged family versions of classic works aimed at children were published throughout the 20th century.
Salman Rushdie pictured before the attack of 2022.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Victory City marks a return for Rushdie, who has not set a novel substantially on the Indian subcontinent for over a decade.
Love letters have a rich history as Valentine’s Day gifts.
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A photo beamed via a satellite from a smartphone is never the same as the description of a place the lover must try hard to imagine.
Francesca da Rimini by William Dyce (1837), depicting Dante’s Francesca and Paolo.
National Gallery of Scotland
Not all writing about the soulmate is positive – an expert in the philosophy of love explains the concept’s thorny history.
Figuring out what to do with the ‘Song of Songs’ has preoccupied people reading the Bible for centuries.
'Song of Songs' illustrated by Florence Kingsford/Southern Methodist University/Wikimedia Commons
The famous biblical book alludes to God only once. Historically, though, most interpreters have argued the poem’s about love between the divine and his people.
Dante running from the Three Beasts by William Blake (1824-1827).
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
An expert in Dante and Schiaparelli explains how the fashion house’s new show transforms celebrities into the ‘new beasts’ of the Inferno.
Jack Scanlon in the 2008 film adaptation of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.
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An expert in the representation of the Holocaust on film explains the responsibility of the reader to educate themselves beyond the depth of a single work of fiction.
Could the pugnacious writer ever have imagined that he would one day become a cult hero?
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Is the writer’s appeal less about the power and complexity of his prose, and more about the view of him as a perennial underdog?