Originally posted on Interesting Literature:
In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers the ancient Roman novel that inspired James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald Today is Bloomsday. James Joyce’s vast modernist masterpiece, Ulysses (1922), is set in Dublin on a single day, 16 June 1904. Since at least the 1950s, devotees of…

Originally posted on Interesting Literature:
The best children’s books What are the top ten greatest children’s novels ever written? This is going to prove a contentious list, but below we’ve compiled what we think are ten of the best works of children’s fiction in all of English literature. We’ve had to make some (regrettable) omissions,…

Originally posted on Arabic Literature (in English):
Five emerging novelists will present their works — that came out of a writing workshop with novelist Sahar Elmougy — on Sunday in Cairo: By Mona Elnamoury If you happen to be in Cairo, try to attend the next cultural event hosted by the Doum Cultural Foundation on this coming…

Originally posted on Arabic Literature (in English):
Although award-winning in French, Mohammed Hasan Alwan doesn’t have a novel available in English. When he took the this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction, it became certain that would change. Chip Rossetti talks to Alwan about the subject of his IPAF-winning novel, as well as the prize…

Originally posted on Interesting Literature:
Fun facts about the Victorian novelist 1. A novel written by Victorian author Wilkie Collins when he was 20, titled Iolani and set in Tahiti, was eventually published in 1999. Written in 1844 but not published until 110 years after his death, Iolani: Or, Tahiti as It Was was Collins’s…

Originally posted on Interesting Literature:
A summary of a much-loved poem Since Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If—’ was first published in Kipling’s volume of short stories and poems, Rewards and Fairies, in 1910, it has become one of Kipling’s best-known poems, and was even voted the UK’s favourite poem of all time in a poll of…

Originally posted on Interesting Literature:
Fun facts about John Bunyan’s classic book 1. John Bunyan’s most famous book has a claim to being the first English novel. Others have argued that The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Bunyan’s masterpiece, is less a ‘novel’ and more a religious allegory – which it certainly is. Bunyan the book while…