Curating some of the best recent links across literature, philosophy, and the arts

Literature, Poetry, Theatre
- The Year in Review: 10 Moments That Rocked the Literary World in 2016
- Alice Munro: Master of the Contemporary Short Story
- Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi
- The Beckett Circle: Autumn 2016 Issue Now Online
- Aldous Huxley to George Orwell: My dystopia is better than yours
- Jeanette Winterson talks to Deborah Treisman about her book of Christmas stories and her own Dickensian childhood
- The Root: Give one of these 26 books by black authors as a gift for the holidays
- A new literary biography considers how Vladimir Nabokov & Edmund Wilson went from friends to enemies
- A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex and the Mind by Siri Hustvedt
- Siri Hustvedt: ‘Trump was elected because misogyny is alive and well’
- In A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, Siri Hustvedt contemplates art, sex and science
- First trailer of Amazon’s biopic of Zelda Fitzgerald starring Christina Ricci is out
- “I began writing in high school, writing novel after novel and always throwing them out.” —Joyce Carol Oates
- What the trial of Madame Bovary revealed about the freedom of the press
- It Can Happen Here! Renewed interest in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America
- How Virago Press changed feminist publishing forever
- Don DeLillo‘s description of New York City at Christmas-time
- Peter Mendelsund on redesigning The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Vertigo by W.G. Sebald
- Shirley Hazzard: Rediscover the literary legacy of the acclaimed Australian-American writer
- Four writers on the literary women who most inspire them
- Shirley Jackson centenary: a quiet, hidden rage
- Adrienne Brown on how early “sky-scrapers” shifted our perception of race in America
- Death by Entertainment in the Work of Michael Crichton
- Meet Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s overlooked artist sister
- How Science Fiction helps make sense of an uncertain future
- On the exhibit commemorating the 150th anniversary of Charles Baudelaire‘s death
- Stéphane Mallarmé built an intellectual defense against the agony of mourning
- “A person does not always look like himself,” Dostoevsky writes of sitting for his portrait by Vasily Perov
- Fight Club‘s dark fantasies have become an even darker reality
- How the radio inspired and informed the unforgettable work of Muriel Spark
Art, Design, Photography
- Irving Penn’s ‘Portraits in a Corner’ (circa 1948) – Gropius, O’Keeffe, Duchamp, Dietrich
- Night in the woodblock prints of Tsuchiya Kōitsu (1870-1949)
- The History of Western Architecture: From Ancient Greece to Rococo (A Free Online Course)
- Why one writer National Post argues European power and authority fuelled modern art
- The best graphic novels of all time
- Salvador Dalí creates a dream sequence for Spellbound, Hitchcock’s psychoanalytic thriller
- Watch Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved characters enter the real world
- Peter Mendelsund on redesigning The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Vertigo by W.G. Sebald
- Joachim Patinir‘s biblical ‘world landscapes’ (1512-1524)
- Watch M.C. Escher make his final artistic creation in the 1971 film Adventures in Perception
- Meet Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s overlooked artist sister
- Rare exhibition of Paul Cézanne‘s modern portraits set to tour London, Paris & Washington
Philosophy & Theory
- John McKeane’s Literary Encyclopedia entry on Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
Music
- Watch Miles Davis improvise music for “Elevator to the Gallows,” Louis Malle’s thriller
- Charles Mingus’ “top secret” eggnog recipe Ccntains “enough alcohol to put down an elephant.”
- Recordings of jazz legends that haven’t been heard by the public since the 1930s are finally being released
- A neural network that has learned to produce choral cantatas in the style of Bach
Film & TV
- Batman Unmasked: Analyzing A Cultural Icon
- 50 modern classics: How many of these 21st-century greats have you seen?
- Blowup 50th anniversary: in search of the London locations
- Antonioni’s Blowup, a countercultural masterpiece about the act of seeing and the art of image making is on its way to Criterion Collection
- Watch Miles Davis improvise music for “Elevator to the Gallows,” Louis Malle’s thriller
- First trailer of Amazon’s biopic of Zelda Fitzgerald starring Christina Ricci is out
- Creators of The Man in the High Castle: there are ‘deeply disturbing’ parallels
- Salvador Dalí creates a dream sequence for Spellbound, Hitchcock’s psychoanalytic thriller
- The Eyes of Hitchcock: A mesmerizing video essay on the expressive power of eyes in Hitchcock’s films
- Watch Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved characters enter the real world
- The Feminist Politics of Star Wars
- The Big Sleep: Seventy years since Howard Hawks’ electrifying film noir masterpiece
- Fight Club‘s dark fantasies have become an even darker reality
- John Waters writes an ode to his childhood home
News, History, Politics
- Siri Hustvedt: ‘Trump was elected because misogyny is alive and well’
- Anne Frank may not have been betrayed to Nazi occupiers, but captured by chance, says new study
- Despite work on gender equality in academia, the problem of all male panels persists
- The curious and ongoing history of the golem
- John Edgar Wideman adds a quietly harrowing postscript to the tragedy of Emmett Till
- Library closures ‘will double unless immediate action is taken’