Poetry Challenge Day 5: Sharing Edna St. Vincent Millay With Others
Welcome to the Poetry Challenge A poem can lift the spirits and nourish the soul. This week, let’s all learn one together! More
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Poetry Challenge Day 4: How Art Greets the Day
Welcome to the Poetry Challenge A poem can lift the spirits and nourish the soul. This week, let’s all learn one together! More
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Poetry Challenge Day 3: Understanding Edna St. Vincent Millay’s New York
Welcome to the Poetry Challenge A poem can lift the spirits and nourish the soul. This week, let’s all learn one together! More
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Poetry Challenge Day 2: Learning a Poem’s Rhythm
Welcome to the Poetry Challenge A poem can lift the spirits and nourish the soul. This week, let’s all learn one together! More
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Poetry Challenge: Memorize ‘Recuerdo’ by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Welcome to the Poetry Challenge A poem can lift the spirits and nourish the soul. This week, let’s all learn one together! More
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Overlooked Clue Sheds Light on Shakespeare’s Marriage
New research undermines the traditional view that Shakespeare was a distant, neglectful husband to his wife, Anne.Any clue about William Shakespeare’s life usually excites scholars, but one piece of evidence had been neglected for decades. Now, a new analysis of that overlooked document seems to shatter a longstanding narrative about the Bard’s bad marriage.Shakespeare was 18 in 1582 when he married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a family friend in Stratford-upon-Avon who was in her mid-20s and pregnant. For centuries, it was thought that the writer left his wife and children behind to lead a literary life in London, seeking to avoid “the humiliation of domestic feuds,” as one influential 19th-century essayist put it.This view of Shakespeare’s wife as a “distant encumbrance” suited scholars who thought “Shakespeare was far too interesting to be a married guy,” Matthew Steggle, a literature professor at the University of Bristol in England, said in an interview. The perception was bolstered by the fact that Shakespeare had famously bequeathed her his “second best bed” in his will.But Mr. Steggle’s new research, expected to be published this week in the journal Shakespeare, suggests that the writer was not detached from his marriage after all.The hint lies in a fragment of a 17th-century letter addressing a “Mrs Shakspaire,” found in the binding of a book published in 1608. The letter’s existence was noted in 1978 by an amateur historian, but it got minimal attention, even after the book was unbound in 2016, revealing what appeared to be part of a reply from Shakespeare’s wife, Mr. Steggle said.He was working on a Shakespeare biography when he learned of the 1978 find, and was surprised it wasn’t better known. Technological advances allowed him to track down people mentioned in the long-ago correspondence, along with other evidence indicating that it included the playwright’s wife, he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel-Winning Peruvian Novelist, Dies at 89
Mr. Vargas Llosa, who ran for Peru’s presidency in 1990 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, transformed episodes from his personal life into books that reverberated far beyond the borders of his native country.Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist who combined gritty realism with playful erotica and depictions of the struggle for individual liberty in Latin America, while also writing essays that made him one of the most influential political commentators in the Spanish-speaking world, died on Sunday in Lima. He was 89.His death was announced in a social media statement from his children, Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana Vargas Llosa.Mr. Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, gained renown as a young writer with slangy, blistering visions of the corruption, moral compromises and cruelty festering in Peru. He joined a cohort of writers like Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia and Julio Cortázar of Argentina, who became famous in the 1960s as members of Latin America’s literary “boom generation.”His distaste for the norms of polite society in Peru gave him abundant inspiration. After he was enrolled at the age of 14 in the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, Mr. Vargas Llosa turned that experience into his first novel, “The Time of the Hero,” a critical account of military life published in 1963.The book was denounced by several generals, including one who claimed it was financed by Ecuador to undermine Peru’s military — all of which helped make it an immediate success.Mr. Vargas Llosa was never fully enamored, however, by his contemporaries’ magical realism. And he was disillusioned with Fidel Castro’s persecution of dissidents in Cuba, breaking from the leftist ideology that held sway for decades over many writers in Latin America.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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Mario Vargas Llosa: An Appreciation
The Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was the world’s savviest and most accomplished political novelist.Once upon a time, during the last quarter of the 20th century, it was possible to argue that one person was America’s best novelist and best literary critic. I am talking about John Updike, whose long and elegant reviews in The New Yorker set reading agendas.Such was Updike’s influence that readers paid heed when, in the mid-1980s, he developed a sustained literary man-crush on the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who died on Sunday at 89.More than once in his reviews of Vargas Llosa’s novels, Updike took note of the author’s handsomeness and urbanity. He was more impressed by Vargas Llosa’s substantial intelligence, his learning, his versatility and his imagination, which could conjure the comic fussiness of a tiny left-wing splinter group in solemn session, or the nauseated feelings of a young wife who discovers that her husband is gay, or the mixed feelings of a citified idealist engaging in a gun battle in the Andes while beset with altitude sickness.Vargas Llosa “has replaced Gabriel García Márquez” as the South American novelist North American readers must catch up on, Updike wrote in 1986, four years after García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature and 24 years before Vargas Llosa himself would.Even Updike was two decades late to the writer’s work. Vargas Llosa had already published most of his major and enduring novels, including “The Time of the Hero” (1963), “The Green House” (1966), “Conversation in the Cathedral” (1969) and “The War of the End of the World” (1981). These grainy, raunchy, politically minded and mind-expanding books found a worldwide audience but were slower to catch on in the United States.Vargas Llosa had helped start, in the early 1960s, a movement that became known as the Boom, a term applied to a freewheeling and socially conscious new generation of Latin American writers: García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Juan Rulfo, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, José Donoso and Miguel Ángel Asturias, among others.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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How to Be a Happy 85-Year-Old (Like Me)
In 2000, I published a book called “Rules for Aging,” a sort of how-to guide for navigating the later years of one’s life. I was 60 at the time and thought that I knew a thing or two about being old. Twenty-five years later, I just finished a sequel, which reflects my advice for growing very, very old. (I have been doing a lot of that lately.) It took me 85 years to learn these things, but I believe they’re applicable at any age.1. Nobody’s thinking about you.It was true 25 years ago, and it’s true today. Nobody is thinking about you. Nobody ever will. Not your teacher, not your minister, not your colleagues, not your shrink, not a soul. It can be a bummer of a thought. But it’s also liberating. That time you fell on your butt in public? That dumb comment you made at dinner last week? That brilliant book you wrote? No one is thinking about it. Others are thinking about themselves. Just like you.2. Make young friends.For older folks, there is nothing more energizing than the company of the young. They’re bright, enthusiastic, informative and brimming with life, and they do not know when you’re telling them lies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
