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An Unequal Partnership: On the Marriage of Kingsley Amis and Jane Howard
Kingsley Amis’s relationship with Elizabeth Jane Howard, known as Jane, was a stabilizing force, at least for him. Both were ambitious writers, but only one could achieve success. The other was...
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Is Shakespeare the Ultimate Dead White Male?
On this episode of the Baillie Gifford Prize podcast, Read Smart, the prize’s 25th-anniversary “winner of winners,” James Shapiro, talks to host Razia Iqbal about Shakiespeare’s relevance today. Head...
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Literary Friends to Enemies: Why Graham Greene Hated Anthony Burgess
A famous fellow British author, a Catholic no less, lived in Monaco, twenty miles from Greene’s apartment. Anthony Burgess and Graham Greene knew one another, yet seldom socialized. Still, Burgess...
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More Than A Children’s Story: The Velveteen Rabbit At 100
Margery Williams was born in London on July 22, 1881, and died September 4, 1944, in New York City. Though she published twenty-seven books, including five translations of works from French and...
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How Franz Kafka Achieved Cult Status in Cold War America
Even though Franz Kafka had been dead since 1924, his writing would provide Cold War-era writers and intellectuals in the United States with a literary vocabulary for imagining life behind the Iron...
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James Shapiro: Shakespeare Was NOT More Than One Person
In this episode of the Read Smart podcast, host Razia Iqbal will be speaking to James Shapiro, who won the prize in 2006 with 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. Iqbal and Shapiro explore...
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Can you guess these famous writers by their childhood nicknames?
Famous writers: they’re just like us. At least in the sense that they too were children once. And some of them even endured the ritual of a childhood nickname, whether cruel or adoring or somewhere in...
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Kurt Vonnegut thought Bob Dylan was “the worst poet alive.”
Everyone knows that Kurt Vonnegut loved music. There’s that quote, you know the one. Vonnegut liked to repeat himself, but here’s how it appears in A Man Without a Country: No matter how corrupt,...
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Literary Fight Club: On the Great Poets’ Brawl of ‘68
One Saturday evening in 1968, the poets battled on Long Island. Drinks spilled into the grass. Punches were flung; some landed. Chilean and French poets stood on a porch and laughed while the Americans...
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What Virginia Woolf’s “Dreadnought Hoax” Tells Us About Ourselves
I first read Virginia Woolf’s novels in the early 1980s as a visiting undergraduate at the University of Sussex, its campus nestled in the South Downs just seven miles from Monks House, Woolf’s country...
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