Hacker News with Generative AI: Literature

The Political Afterlife of Paradise Lost (newstatesman.com)
In 1790, 126 years after John Milton was buried beneath the floor of St Giles’s, Cripplegate, his coffin was broken open by builders renovating the church.

Politics, History, Literature

54 points by drdee 1 day ago | 15 comments

A Man of Parts and Learning Fara Dabhoiwala on the Portrait of Francis Williams (lrb.co.uk)

Biography, Art, History, Literature

22 points by bryanrasmussen 2 days ago | 2 comments

Austen and Darwin converged on the question of beauty (aeon.co)
In 1833, two years into his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle, a 24-year-old Charles Darwin wrote a letter home to his sister Catherine, entreating her for supplies.

Literature, Science, History

41 points by gmays 2 days ago | 5 comments

Chrestomathy (wikipedia.org)
A chrestomathy (/krɛˈstɒməθi/ kreh-STOM-ə-thee; from the Ancient Greek χρηστομάθεια khrēstomátheia 'desire of learning', from χρηστός khrēstós 'useful' + μανθάνω manthánō 'learn') is a collection of selected literary passages (usually from a single author); a selection of literary passages from a foreign language assembled for studying the language; or a text in various languages, used especially as an aid in learning a subject.

Language Learning, Literature, Linguistics, Education

18 points by thunderbong 6 days ago | 1 comments

"Here I Gather All the Friends" Machiavelli and Emergence of the Private Study (publicdomainreview.org)
Reading is a form of necromancy, a way to summon and commune once again with the dead, but in what ersatz temple should such a ritual take place?

History, Books, Literature, Philosophy, Culture

23 points by Jhsto 6 days ago | 0 comments

Neal Stephenson on History, Spycraft, and American-Soviet Parallels (conversationswithtyler.com)
Neal Stephenson’s ability to illuminate complex, future-focused ideas in ways that both provoke thought and spark wonder has established him as one of the most innovative thinkers in literature today. Yet his new novel, Polostan, revisits the Soviet era with a twist, shifting his focus from the speculative technologies of tomorrow to the historical currents of the 1930s.

Science Fiction, History, Politics, Literature

14 points by hackandthink 7 days ago | 1 comments

A Woman Who Defined the Great Depression (newrepublic.com)
Sanora Babb spent her life dealing with all the multifarious daily perils that prevent writers from writing.

Great Depression, Biography, Literature, Women's History

50 points by samclemens 7 days ago | 16 comments

Stanley Kubrick's Annotated Copy of Stephen King's the Shining (openculture.com)
The web site Overlook Hotel has posted pictures of Stanley Kubrick’s personal copy of Stephen King’s novel The Shining. The book is filled with highlighted passages and largely illegible notes in the margin—tantalizing clues to Kubrick’s intentions for the movie.

Film, Literature, Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick, The Shining

4 points by coloneltcb 8 days ago | 0 comments

Samantha Harvey's 'beautiful and ambitious' Orbital wins Booker prize (theguardian.com)
Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the only British writer shortlisted this year, has won the 2024 Booker prize, the UK’s most prestigious prize for fiction.

Literature, Awards, United Kingdom

39 points by mitchbob 8 days ago | 10 comments

The history of the epigraph from Appointment in Samarra (2022) (subsublibrarian.com)
The epigraph from John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra was much of what I remembered from an earlier reading of the novel, but I realized today that I’d never looked into its background – the cited W. Somerset Maugham seeming an unlikely true origin for a tale about death in Samarra. So below is my reconstruction of the tale’s journey to O’Hara.

Literature, History, Books, Writing, Research

31 points by dang 10 days ago | 11 comments

Gadsby: Wikip_dia's Lost Lipogram (2015) [pdf] (core.ac.uk)

Literature, Language, History, Linguistics

9 points by pncnmnp 14 days ago | 0 comments

Statistical challenges and misreadings of literature create unreplicable science [pdf] (stat.columbia.edu)

Science, Statistics, Reproducibility, Research, Literature

67 points by luu 16 days ago | 52 comments

Monkeys will never type Shakespeare, study finds (bbc.com)
Two Australian mathematicians have called into question an old adage, that if given an infinite amount of time, a monkey pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Mathematics, Science, Literature

10 points by louthy 20 days ago | 3 comments

Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds (theguardian.com)
Mathematicians have called into question the old adage that a monkey typing randomly at a keyboard for long enough would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare.

Mathematics, Probability, Language Models, Literature

83 points by hackernj 20 days ago | 158 comments

Monkeys Will Never Type Shakespeare (bbc.co.uk)
Two Australian mathematicians have called into question an old adage, that if given an infinite amount of time, a monkey pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Mathematics, Probability, Literature, Shakespeare

8 points by zabzonk 20 days ago | 2 comments

Monkeys will never type Shakespeare, study finds (bbc.com)
Two Australian mathematicians have called into question an old adage, that if given an infinite amount of time, a monkey pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Mathematics, Literature, Science

6 points by sonabinu 20 days ago | 1 comments

A Font Book of Squiggles in Tristram Shandy (oneletterwords.com)
Laurence Sterne’s serpentine squiggle is an eloquent testament to the limitation of words. The twisting line represents a stick waving in the air to wordlessly communicate the vagaries of married life, relating a thousand syllogisms’-worth of meaning.

Literature, Typography, Art

12 points by lordleft 20 days ago | 3 comments

Global Book Banning Statistics (wordsrated.com)
From the available records, India is the country that historically accounts for most of the book bans in the World, as 11.11% of all recorded bans occurred in India at some point.

Censorship, India, Literature

7 points by thisislife2 23 days ago | 2 comments

Scott Fitzgerald's Last Act (city-journal.org)
The final year of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life was both a tragedy and, in a more obscure sense, a triumph.

Literature, Biography, History

46 points by samclemens 24 days ago | 35 comments

Robert Fergusson: Scotia's Bard (historytoday.com)
On 17 October 1774 the Scots poet Robert Fergusson died.

Poetry, Scotland, History, Literature

5 points by pepys 26 days ago | 0 comments

Why I Am Not a PhD (persuasion.community)
English departments teach theory, not literature.

Education, Literature, Academia

8 points by peanutcrisis 29 days ago | 0 comments

A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending (newyorker.com)
If Glenn Horowitz comes calling, should you be flattered or alarmed? It means that you have an exceptional literary reputation. It also means that your time on earth is nearly up.

Books, Literature, Controversies, Death

81 points by acabal 30 days ago | 34 comments

An amateur historian has discovered a long-lost short story by Bram Stoker (bbc.com)
An amateur historian has discovered a long-lost short story by Bram Stoker, published just seven years before his legendary gothic novel Dracula.

Literature, History, Bram Stoker, Dracula

323 points by lermontov 31 days ago | 126 comments

Kurt Vonnegut's lost board game published (polygon.com)
It could have been a contemporary of Risk, Diplomacy, and other legendary wargames

Games, History, Literature, Board Games

348 points by musha68k 32 days ago | 97 comments

Machine conquest: Jules Verne's technocratic worldmaking (cambridge.org)

Science Fiction, Literature, Technology, Jules Verne

66 points by johntfella 32 days ago | 61 comments

The Oblivion Mod Terry Pratchett Worked On (eurogamer.net)
In his Foreword to The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy, the late Sir Terry Pratchett writes, "Imagination, not intelligence, made us human."

Gaming, Fantasy, Literature, Terry Pratchett

66 points by raidicy 32 days ago | 3 comments

All possible plots by major authors (2020) (the-fence.com)
We praise canonical authors for their boundless imagination. Then why do all their plots feel the same?

Literature, Analysis, Storytelling

181 points by ohjeez 36 days ago | 136 comments

The Remarkable Legacy of Lewis Lapham (lithub.com)
You only meet a few people in your life who, like stars, exert a pull so strong that they alter its trajectory completely.

Biography, Literature, Legacy

20 points by Caiero 38 days ago | 3 comments

The woman who revolutionized the fantasy genre is finally getting her due (theconversation.com)

Fantasy, Literature, Recognition, Genre

37 points by bookofjoe 39 days ago | 1 comments

Lore Segal Saw the World in a Nutshell (theatlantic.com)
Lore Segal, who died on Monday, spent the last four months of her life looking out the window.

Obituaries, Literature, Arts, Culture

12 points by prismatic 40 days ago | 1 comments