It's Lit!

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte was there for the weird girls, the quiet ones who watched and listened, the ones who pined away for someone to accept them in all of their weird, dark glory. But in the nearly 175 years since its publication, the collective definition of what it means to be “a woman on the outside of society” has changed and expanded dramatically—and yet here we are, still dissecting.

Manga, by its most simplistic definition, are comics or graphic novels originating from Japan, which became extremely popular in the United States starting in the 80s and 90s. We’ve already touched on Western Graphic Novels and Comics, but you know we couldn’t just leave it at that. So today we’re discussing manga as its own rich literature, reflecting the complicated political history of Japan.

To some people, the idea of a pen name seems kind of weird. If I, a writer, am going to put countless hours of hard work and thought into my masterpiece, why wouldn’t I want to put my own name underneath the title? But some of literature's biggest names, from Mark Twain to Dr. Seuss, aren't their real names. Here's why.

Here’s the problem with tackling Ernest Hemingway—Ernest Hemingway himself. While the iconic author is mostly known for his feats of literary prowess, from The Sun Also Rises to For Whom the Bell Tolls, to countless short stories—perhaps his greatest fiction of all is his own self-mythologizing. As his brand grew in the 1920s and 30s, so too grew his celebrity and, well, his ego.

We spend a lot of time pontificating on the high canon of books: Your Shakespeares, your Tolstoys, your… erotic beast wars fanfiction. But today we’re craving something a little lighter, a little fluffier… novels you pick up for the sake of just having something quick-- your beach reads, your airport novels, your Books of the Month. Books that somehow manage to dominate water-cooler discussions.

One of the most influential periods in Black American History post-slavery is the Harlem Renaissance, an intellectual, social, and artistic explosion centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City. Novels like Passing by Nella Larsen, Their Eyes Were Works written during this period and have become important pieces of American history,

Forbes once called her “The Warren Buffett of vampires,” but American author, Anne Rice has established herself as the literary queen of monsters of ALL kinds over her four-and-a-half decade career. Besides her 15 novels of the world-famous Vampire Chronicles series, she’s also written 21 other books featuring all your favorite dark, supernatural, and undead beings.

The planet is Arrakis. Also known as Dune and it's a meess. 1965 novel Dune has been previously (and rather infamously) brought to life by David Lynch in 1984, and again in a three-part miniseries on the SyFy channel in the early 2000s. But, What is Dune? Why must the spice flow? And what is with all the sand?

In the past few decades, literature has expanded to not only mean the “novel” but “graphic novels” as well. Today we are gonna break down how the graphic novel went from the comic book store to the classroom.

Some say that theater is dead, and that’s probably because most playhouses the world over are closed at the moment owing to a worldwide pandemic. And yet the musical lives on… on Disney plus -- as the nation has been rapt with a filmed version of the Broadway smash hit, Hamilton. This had us come to the realization that a lot of the bread and butter of musical theater is built off of books!

Few writers have had the sheer staying power, popularity, and prolific output as Stephen King. From insatiably flesh-hungry clowns and sentient cars to telekinetic teenagers and mystical gunslingers. But it’s not just his monsters that have lasting power—it’s also the very human and very psychological elements in his work that linger.

When we talk about book bannings today, we are usually discussing a specific choice made by individual schools, school districts, and libraries made in response to the moralistic outrage of some group. This is still nothing in comparison to the ways books have been removed, censored, and destroyed in the past. Let's explore how the seemingly innocuous book has survived centuries of the ban hammer.