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Hamlet is the great Shakespearean tragedy most frequently mentioned in books. Check the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which charts the frequency of any word or short sentence found in print since the year 1800. And you will find Hamlet mentioned more often than the other great Shakespearean tragedies.
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The Booker Prize is possibly the biggest literary award in the English and certainly gets the biggest publicity. However, Donna Tartt, who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel, The Goldfinch, possibly sold more copies of her book than Richard Flanagan, who won the 2014 Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the
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This is why I love the internet. After hearing the BBC report the death of Gunter Grass, I remembered he had spent some time in Calcutta (now Kolkata). So I googled and came across what appeared not in Indian newspapers, but in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. Both reviewed his book about
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Love is appearing more often in books now than 50 years ago. But not as frequently as in Shakespeare’s time or that of his successors. The writers who followed Shakespeare — John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Robert Herrick, Sir John Suckling — were the ones who wrote most frequently about love.
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Anne Lamott celebrated her 61st birthday two days ago, on April 10. She shares her birthday with Paul Theroux, who turned 74 on that day. Book lovers and wanna-be writers will enjoy reading her classic Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Here’s what she wrote about what’s so special about books.
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Paul Theroux, who is celebrating his 74th birthday today, is eminently quotable. I was going through The Great Railway Bazaar, his runaway bestseller published in 1975, and Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, published in 2008, where he once again travels by rail from England to Japan and back, and this is what I found.
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Today is the birthday of William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 – April 23, 1850), a poet who grows on you. He strikes a deeper chord in me now than when I was young. Many of his poems, of course, can be appreciated at any age. For example, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. I wandered lonely
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“Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.” That’s what Susan Sontag advised writers. I haven’t read Sontag but could appreciate her words, quoted by Maria Popova in Brain Pickings. And I could thoroughly appreciate this poem by Charles Bukowski called So You Want to be a Writer? “If it doesn’t come
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Even the heavens wept, with the rain coming down on Lee Kuan Yew’s funeral. That couldn’t prevent people from pouring out on the streets to pay their respects to the departed leader. “Lee Kuan Yew! Lew Kuan Yew!” the crowd chanted in thunderous ovation to the founder of the nation. Vindication or nostalgia, it had
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It’s the end of an era in Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew died at 3.18 am today at the Singapore General Hospital, where he had been warded for severe pneumonia for more than a month. He was 91.
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