Tag: voice,

Torn Dresses, Frank Sinatra, Ghosts in the Loo: Judi Dench on a Lifetime of Playing Shakespeare

When I was at the old Vic, I had a number of walk-ons and understudy roles—one of which was in Henry VIII with Sir John Gielgud, Harry Andrews and Dame Edith Evans. That was the production when they famously all dried on the first night. All of them—John, Harry and Edith—in that long scene between […]

The PEN America Literary Awards have been cancelled.

Following months of escalating protest over the organization’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza, and the recent withdrawal of over a third of this year’s nominees, the 2024 PEN America Literary Awards have now officially been canceled. In the last hour, PEN America confirmed this cancellation in a press release published on the organization’s website: […]

A Summary and Analysis of Amanda Gorman’s ‘We Rise’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Amanda Gorman’s poem ‘We Rise’ is an inspiring piece celebrating female empowerment and solidarity which calls upon women to support each other to bring about social change. The poem also cleverly summons the work of earlier poets who had written on the same topic. Summary Gorman begins the poem […]

Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poetry

In the past several months, Taylor Swift has become culturally ubiquitous in a way that feels nearly terrifying. Superstardom tends to turn normal people into cartoons, projections, gods, monsters. Swift has been inching toward some sort of tipping point for a while. The most recent catalyst was, in part, love: in the midst of her […]

Jorie Graham’s Poetry of the Earth and Humanity, Set to Music

“Music for New Bodies,” premiering Saturday at Rice University in Houston, sets Jorie Graham’s poetry to music with a chamber group of instruments and electronics, as well as five vocalists. Peter Sellars wanted to know more. He was in San Francisco a few years ago, attending a performance of “ The No One’s Rose ,” […]

This Poet Flirts With Sentimentality, but Averts It With Wit

Credit…Eric Timothy Carlson THE SORROW APARTMENTS, by Andrea Cohen Contemporary poetry isn’t witty. That’s not to say it isn’t funny; on the contrary, it can be extremely amusing, sometimes even intentionally. But for the most part, the art form today vacillates between, on one hand, decrying social and/or personal injustices and, on the other, aiming […]

A Summary and Analysis of John Cheever’s ‘The Worm in the Apple’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The short stories of John Cheever (1912-82) are among the greatest American short stories of the twentieth century. His Collected Stories runs to 900 pages and contains tales which are by turns realist, borderline magic-realist, and downright strange. In Cheever’s short story ‘The Worm in the Apple’, the narrator […]

IALA announces its 2024 annual grants for creative writing and translation

The Armenian Weekly The International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA) is pleased to announce its three new annual grants for one writer and two translators whose works-in-progress show exceptional literary and creative ability. Applications open on September 1 until September 30, 2024, and winners will be announced in December 2024. The International Armenian Literary Alliance’s Creative […]

A Tale of Four Troubled and Talented Sisters, Told With Irish Flair

The illustration shows a hilly Irish countryside under a nighttime sky, with three sisters searching for their lost fourth sibling in the foreground. THE ALTERNATIVES, by Caoilinn Hughes Caoilinn Hughes’s exuberant third novel opens with Olwen Flattery, a geology professor, lecturing her undergraduate students about tectonic convergence. “ Just imagine the force it would take […]

7 Poetry Collections that Transform the Personal Into Portals

Photo by Samuel Pagel via Unsplash Poets for generations have contended with the indeterminable, fluid relationship between the speaker and the self. We all know the dictum to write what you know, but I find more possibility and permission in Eudora Welty’s way: “Write about what you don’t know about what you know.” In my […]