"Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid." Illustration for Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies by Jessie Wilcox Smith, ca. 1916

Man of Science, Man of God

In The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley parodied the dogmatic belief held by many in Victorian England that faith and reason are incompatible.
Poet Johnathan McClain reads his poetry at the Bowery Poetry Club December 6, 2002 in New York City.

The Legacy and Power of Performance Poetry: A Reading List

MTV might take credit for getting spoken word on the pop cultural radar, but it’s a tradition that spans millennia and continents.
Arthur Miller, 1965

Arthur Miller, Comedian

Yep. The author of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible wrote comedies as well. Funny ones.
Kavita Daswani’s For Matrimonial Purposes (2003); Daswani’s The Village Bride of Beverly Hills (2004); and Sonia Singh’s Goddess for Hire (2004).

The Hybrid Heroines of “Bollywood Chick Lit”

Material consumption and marriage have different meanings for South Asian American women, and those meanings should shape the way we read Desi “chick lit.”
Harry C. Hindmarsh

The Editor Who Drove Hemingway Away

Harry C. Hindmarsh, assistant managing editor of the Toronto Daily Star, knew how to get under Ernest Hemingway’s skin.
The cover of Black Milk by Elif Shafak

Fear and Fertility in Elif Shafak’s Black Milk

Shafak exposes her terror over motherhood’s potential to devour creativity—a panic she imagines sharing with a parade of literary forebears.

Feminist Bookstore News by the Numbers

Now part of Reveal Digital, Feminist Bookstore News was a vital source of information (and gossip) amid a flourishing in publishing fifty years ago.
Painting of Song Ong Siang by J. Wentscher, 1936

Writing a “Different Type of Chinese” into Being

The Western-educated Straits Chinese elite of colonial Malaya were among the first writers to produce a local literature in the English language.

What We’re Reading 2024

It’s become a tradition: the writers and editors at JSTOR Daily share our thoughts on this year's pleasure reading.
Alastair Sim as Scrooge in the film of the same name, adapted from Charles Dickens' novel A Christmas Carol

Annotations: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Scrooge became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.