Love and fantasy: J.K. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkien both had doubts about their characters’ relationships
In an article published Tuesday morning in the Guardian, Alison Flood reported that poet W.H. Auden had attempted to persuade J.R.R. Tolkien to “Drop the romance between Aragorn and Arwen… Read more »
J.K. Rowling is not going to make a list of “favorite Scottish books” anytime soon
From Robert Burns and Walter Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Hugh MacDiarmid, the list of names associated with Scottish literature is littered with some of the… Read more »
Movies you might not have known were written by novelists
Last week saw the highly-anticipated release of the film The Counselor, and since the film hit theaters on October 25th the reviews have been pouring in. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning… Read more »
Beloved Boston bookstore set to reopen its doors
Book-loving travelers of New England suffered an almost catastrophic blow in the spring of 2013 when Chicago-based chain Barbara’s Bookstores was forced to shutter its store in Boston’s South Station… Read more »
Russian court bans the Quran
In a move that is bound to alienate a large segment of Russia’s sizable Muslim population, the Guardian reports that “A court in the Russian city of Novorossiysk” has recently… Read more »
Lucha libre: literary wrestling in Peru
Literary history is replete with stories of struggling writers forced to take on menial jobs and carry out humiliating tasks in order to finance their art, but until recently there… Read more »
Contemporary Iranian literature flourishes despite government censorship
While Iran has historically been home to one of the world’s richest and most vibrant literary cultures, in recent years, civil unrest, political pressure, and government censorship have transformed the… Read more »
The whaling adventure that inspired Moby-Dick heading to screens big and small
In November of 1820, the American whaling ship Essex sunk after being attacked by a gigantic sperm whale in the southern Pacific Ocean. The story of the ill-fated vessel, which… Read more »