In Santa Cruz, Calif., volunteers will re-enact every word and movement in the famous courtroom scene. In Monroeville, Ala., residents dressed in 1930s garb will read aloud from memorable passages. In Rhinebeck, N.Y., Oblong Books will host a party with Mocktails and recorded music by the indie band the Boo Radleys. Read more…

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I am not an American,” Mark Twain once proclaimed, “I am the American.” He had good warrant for saying so. Of all the nation’s writers he is still considered the greatest – it’s not merely literary distinction but something even bigger than that. From Theodore Roosevelt onwards, American presidents have routinely salted their oratory with down-home Twainisms. Read more… 

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"The Stories of Ray Bradbury"—a 1,112-page Everyman's Library anthology to be published April 6, a few months ahead of its author's 90th birthday on Aug. 22—is filled with fictional wonders. Among them: time-travelers who take refuge from a fearful future in an anxious past; a children's playroom where the videotronic lions have real teeth; an ocean-dwelling dinosaur that falls in love with a lighthouse. Read more…

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When I began teaching in the early 1980s, I was only dimly aware that a revolution was taking place in how Shakespeare’s world and works were understood.

A decade earlier, as an undergraduate at Columbia University, I had been introduced to Shakespeare’s England through The Elizabethan World Picture (1943), EMW Tillyard’s slim and influential volume. We learned from Tillyard that English Renaissance culture was conservative in nature and defined by rigid hierarchy, a view confirmed by Ulysses’ famous speech in Troilus and Cressida on the importance of everyone knowing his place (“Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark, what discord follows”). Years passed before I registered how desperate Tillyard’s book was, how much it represented a futile effort to bind on to Shakespeare’s England what was fast unravelling in his own. Read more…

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Most Shakespeare experts have a lot to say about the conspiracy theorists who deny Shakespeare’s authorship of his own plays – but very little of it is printable, let alone as readable as James Shapiro’s Contested Will. Read more…

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In Sutton Courtenay churchyard about 10 miles south of Oxford, near the imposing tomb of H. H. Asquith, the prime minister 100 years ago, a much simpler gravestone reads “Eric Arthur Blair.” It was to that grave a friend and I recently made a pilgrimage for a sad anniversary. Blair died of tuberculosis on Jan. 21, 1950, at the age of 46, just when he had found fame and fortune under the name by which the world knows him, George Orwell. Read more…

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In 1907 Mark Twain, America’s best-loved living author, visited England in a blaze of glory. Among the fellow literary lights he met there were Rudyard Kipling, who described the camera shutters around Twain “click-clicking like gun locks,” and George Bernard Shaw. “He is in very much the same position as myself,” Shaw said of Twain. “He has to put matters in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang him believe he is joking.” Read more…

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F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway met for the first time in 1925 in Paris, just as Fitzgerald’s third novel, “The Great Gatsby,” was being published in the United States. As recounted in the previous Second Reading, Hemingway was not a kind man and was especially unkind to Fitzgerald in “A Moveable Feast,” his memoir of Paris in the 1920s, but when Fitzgerald gave him a copy of “Gatsby,” Hemingway had to draw in his horns. With characteristic self-importance, he said it was now his duty to “try to be a good friend” to Fitzgerald because, he acknowledged, “If he could write a book as fine as ‘The Great Gatsby’ I was sure that he could write an even better one.” Read more…

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36 Arguments for the Existence of God plunges into the great debate of our day: the clash between faith and reason. World events are being shaped by fervent believers at home and abroad, while a new atheism is asserting itself in the public sphere. On purely intellectual grounds the skeptics would seem to have everything on their side. Yet people refuse to accept their seemingly irrefutable arguments and continue to embrace faith in God as their source of meaning, purpose, and comfort. Lean more…

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