I’d just finished and loved Miranda July’s novel “All Fours” last year when my colleague Marie Solis wrote a profile of July with the headline, “She Wrote the First Great Perimenopause Novel.” This was the first time I’d heard the book mentioned in these superlative terms. “All Fours” is about a woman in her 40s…
Agatha Christie is dead. But Agatha Christie also just started teaching a writing class. “I must confess,” she says, in a cut-glass English accent, “that this is all rather new to me.” The literary legend, who died in 1976, has been tapped to teach a course with BBC Maestro, an online lecture series similar to…
The first poem I memorized was “Pinkle Purr” by A.A. Milne. I was around seven years old when I encountered it and was immediately enchanted. It’s a children’s poem, four stanzas, all with the same hypnotic AA/BB/AA rhyme scheme. It’s a poem about a kitten, Pinkle Purr, and his mother, Tattoo, and their changing relationship…
Mr. Mudimbe was unapologetic. “To the question ‘what is Africa?’ or ‘how to define African cultures?’ one today cannot but refer to a body of knowledge in which Africa has been subsumed by Western disciplines such as anthropology, history, theology or whatever other scientific discourse,” he told Callaloo. “And this is the level on which…
Few teenagers would want the world to read their poems. At 13, Charlotte Brontë collected her verse in a humble anthology that already hinted at her ambition to become an author at a time when few women wrote for a public audience. Written in the winter of 1829, the poems in Brontë’s “Book of Rhymes”…
Any clue about William Shakespeare’s life usually excites scholars, but one piece of evidence had been neglected for decades. Now, a new analysis of that overlooked document seems to shatter a longstanding narrative about the Bard’s bad marriage. Shakespeare was 18 in 1582 when he married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a family friend in…
The culture wars returned to the Supreme Court on Tuesday, this time in a battle over whether public schools in Maryland must allow parents with religious objections to withdraw their children from classes in which storybooks with L.G.B.T.Q. themes are discussed. In a long, lively and sometimes heated argument that gave close consideration to a…
Herbert J. Gans, an eminent sociologist who studied the communities and cultural bastions of America up close and shattered popular myths about urban and suburban life, poverty, ethnic groups and the news media, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 97. His death was confirmed by his son, David Gans. A refugee…
The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Department of Defense’s education agency on Tuesday, arguing that the removal of books in response to Trump administration orders infringed on the First Amendment rights of students. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia, centers on a school system for children of military…
Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist who combined gritty realism with playful erotica and depictions of the struggle for individual liberty in Latin America, while also writing essays that made him one of the most influential political commentators in the Spanish-speaking world, died on Sunday in Lima. He was 89. His death was announced in…