literature

Pope Francis defends the humanities

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Here is a taste Pope Francis’s letter to candidates for the Catholic priesthood: “On the Role of Literature in Formation” 1. I had originally chosen to give this Letter a title referring to priestly formation.On further reflection, however, this subject […]

Robert Gottlieb, RIP

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Last weekend I watched the documentary Turn Every Page. Here is the trailer: Before I watched his documentary I knew that Robert Gottlieb was Robert Caro’s editor and he was the editor-in-chief at Alfred A. Knopf publishing house, but that […]

Is it still possible to teach Faulkner in Florida?

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Here is Florida State University Diane Roberts‘s piece at The Atlantic, “‘Most Important, We Must Not Upset DeSantis‘”: In my senior Southern Literature class, I’m about to teach Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner’s great novel about how racism has warped America. […]

Found: A new Phillis Wheatley poem

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Here is a press release from the State University of New York at Albany: A University at Albany professor has discovered the earliest known full-length elegy by famed poet Phillis Wheatley (Peters), widely regarded as the first Black person, enslaved […]

The best campus novels of the last century

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The list includes Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935); Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety (1987); Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring (1993); Philip Roth, The Human Stain (2000); and Tobias Wolff, Old School (2003). Here is Emily Temple at LitHub: The days […]