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In a recent article for The Huffington Post, journalist Erin Schumaker advises students not to let their brains waste away over the summer: "you might be better off skipping the beach read this summer in favor of something a little more substantive." Yet some of us might find the idea of settling down on a sun lounger with War and Peace less than appealing. To help you out, we asked staff at Oxford University Press for a list of summer classics that will help you relax without letting your brain get lazy!

The post Best beach classics: the books you should be reading this summer appeared first on OUPblog.

What have the Romans ever done for us? Ancient Rome is well known for its contribution to the modern world in areas such as sanitation, aqueducts, and roads, but the extent to which it has shaped modern thinking about sexual identity is not nearly so widely recognized.

The post What have the Romans ever done for us? LGBT identities and ancient Rome appeared first on OUPblog.

There were many books on vampires before Bram Stoker's Dracula. Early anthropologists wrote accounts of the folkloric vampire -- a stumbling, bloated peasant, never venturing far from home, and easily neutralized with a sexton’s spade and a box of matches. The literary vampire became a highly mobile, svelte aristocratic rake with the appearance of the short tale The Vampyre in 1819.

The post Before Bram: a timeline of vampire literature appeared first on OUPblog.

As I pack away my Christmas tree for another year, I took stock today of my Christmas haul of books. I’m planning on reading more classics in 2015 and was fortunate enough to receive a few beautiful clothbound editions for Christmas. I hope you too were lucky enough to receive a book or two at Christmas time, […]

I admit it - until now, I'd never read The Picture of Dorian Gray.  Oh, I knew, more or less, the plot.  But when I needed to read Oscar Wilde's horror story for a novel I'm just starting to write, there wasn't a handy copy in the house, so I got it (for free) as part of a kindle Penny Dreadful multi-pack - including The Horrors of Zindorf Castle AND Jack Harkaway and His Son's Adventures in Australia, which, co-incidentally, I also didn't own.

But did you know The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in this magazine in 1890?  

Poet, playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde was born October 16, 1854 in Dublin. While his most famous works, The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, live on, Wilde is most frequently remembered for his wit. Here are 15 of his best quotes for writers, readers and artists in honor of his 160th birthday.

1. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

2. I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

3. If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

4. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

5. The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

6. An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

7. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

8. I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

9. A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

10. Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless.

11. In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

12. I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

13. With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?

14. The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

15. A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.

If yours isn’t listed, share your favorite Wilde bon mot in the comments!

Adrienne Crezo is the managing editor of Writer’s Digest magazine. Follow her on Twitter @a_crezo.

By Maggie Belnap

Short stories populate many childhoods, with the aim to instill morals and virtues in undeveloped and wandering minds. Whether it’s the tale of Rumpelstiltskin or the Boy Who Cried Wolf, these tales make a powerful impression. Take our short stories quiz, based off of Oscar Wilde’s The Complete Short Stories and The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, 2nd ed, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, and see if you really know your short stories.

Scene on the Hudson (Rip Van Winkle) by James Hamilton. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Maggie Belnap is a Social Media Intern at Oxford University Press. She attends Amherst College.

The Complete Short Stories by Oscar Wilde is edited by John Sloan. He is Fellow and Tutor in English, Harris Manchester College, Oxford. The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, 2nd ed, is edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Oates is the National Book Award-winning author of over fifty novels, including bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Oscar Wilde is the author of “The Happy Prince,” “The Fisherman and His Soul,” “The Nightengale and the Rose,” “The Star Child,” and “The Young King.” Washington Irving is the author of “Rip Van Winkle.” James Baldwin is the author of “Sonny’s Blues.”

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The post How well do you know short stories? appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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A new Google Doodle has been unleashed to celebrate the 107th birthday of National Book Award-winning author and marine biologist Rachel Louise Carson. According to The Washington Post, Carson became well known for her bestselling nonfiction titles: Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea, and Silent Spring. In fact, Silent Spring has been credited as the work that "ignited the modern environmental movement." continued...

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Note: This was first posted over at The Nerdy Book Club, a great sight for fans of children’s books. Recommended.

EVERYBODY ELSE IS ALREADY TAKEN

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.

After I wrote the book BYSTANDER (Macmillan, 2009), I began to receive invitations to speak at middle schools. I was wary at first of being perceived as anybody’s “anti-bullying program.”

I wrote a book. Not a pamphlet, not a list of discussion questions, not a nonfiction guide to bullying. I could not offer a handy list of ten ways to make your school a bully-proof zone. I didn’t even believe in it.

I wrote a story –- that was the tool at my disposal.

Stories are essential to our lives. How could we live without them? We watch television, go to movies, tell tales to our friends and neighbors, conjure dreams at night, play complex video games, read books. Humans are storytelling creatures. We seem to need stories. Something inside us craves stories, we hunger for them, ravenous.

Why is that?

Stories function differently than nonfiction. The characters have a way of worming inside our souls. Robert McKee, in his book, STORY, claims that “Stories are equipment for living.”

Equipment for living.

Our lives race past us, a frantic blur, and we move from the next thing, to the next, to the next, with barely a moment’s reflection.

Stories give us pause. They give our lives form and shape. And time. We turn a page. We consider. We piece together the meaning of our days through the stories we hear.

And we ask of these stories the same question, over and over again: What is a good life? How are we to conduct ourselves here on this earth?

Well-told stories, as Harper Lee so beautifully demonstrated in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, allow us to walk in someone’s else’s shoes. Remember that remarkable scene at the end of the book? When Scout walks Boo Radley home, climbs up to his porch, and for a moment turns and looks at the world from his perspective?

Scout concluded: “Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.”

That’s story.

It’s also called empathy, understanding, compassion.

Here’s McKee again: “A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling.”

Story isn’t an escape from reality. It is a light that shines upon the dark corners of our world, the secret places, the hidden fears and hopes and dreams.

It is why books matter, and why, I now know, some teachers have embraced BYSTANDER –- among other novels — as a way to explore this complex topic.

I’ve stood on a stage in auditoriums in front of 500, 600, 700 middle school-age children. Or as they refer to them in Ireland, “young people.” I like that. Young people. So much more intrinsically respectful than kids, little lambs eat ivy.

Despite my experience visiting places like Oklahoma and South Carolina, Illinois and Connecticut, Florida and Michigan, I’m still in the process of learning how to talk about bullying. Still growing into my own shoes. Still learning to speak above a whisper.

One of the central ideas embedded in the book – an idea I came to understand only through the passage of time – also happens to be one that’s incredibly difficult for me to directly convey to middle school students. So I don’t try to tell it, per say, so much as hope it leaks out over everything, like sunlight through the edges of a drawn blind. But I think it’s worth saying to you, here.

Research shows that bullying peaks in middle school. Why is that?

Let’s recall Emerson’s quote from up top, and agree that one of the greatest achievements in life is to become, simply, one’s true self. It sounds easy enough, but as we know, it is not. I’m a father, I have three children, including a 7th-grader and a 9th-grader. I watch their awkwardness and insecurities and struggles.

To be content in your own skin.

To not look to others for your cues.

To accept and trust who you are, to follow your own inner compass.

These are not easy things.

At no time in life is it tougher than in middle school, when peers begin to replace parents as prime influencers. How to dress, what to talk about, what to watch on television, how to act, where to sit, whom to befriend, whom to avoid. This is how we forge identity, hammering out our awareness of self (which is a created thing after all, the “self” we decide to become). At middle school, many of these daily details are powerfully influenced by the pack.

Yet a primary aspect to becoming a true individual is the casting off of those concerns. It’s a challenge for anybody to stand up against the crowd. For a middle schooler, it’s close to impossible. On a deep level, in terms of self-identity, they see themselves as the group. The group is them, the individual swallowed by the great whale. And we are all Pinocchio, trapped inside the dark belly, fumbling for a light, yearning to become a real boy.

This dynamic is how young people find their place in the world. We watch others to learn about ourselves. We tell stories. We listen. And then when it comes to bullying, the adults in their lives tell these young people to not worry what anybody else thinks.

“Who cares what anyone thinks!”

Well, they care. They care so much.

In my heart, I believe the lasting answer to bullying is to become a genuine, authentic, free-thinking, responsible individual. The best definition of responsibility I’ve heard is “the ability to respond,” to act according to the courage of your convictions.

People are good, I absolutely believe that. And the closer people hone into to their true selves, the better and more moral they become.

Be yourself. In doing so, we all become far more likely to allow others the freedom to be their selves.

Shakespeare: “This above all: To thine own self be true!”

Or, if you prefer, Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself. Everybody else is already taken.”

What’s your favorite kind of book? We’ve created a giant flowchart to help you browse the top 50 free eBooks at Project Gutenberg.

Click the image above to see a larger version of the book map. Your choices range from Charles Dickens to Jane Austen, from Sherlock Holmes to needlework. Below, we’ve linked to all 50 free eBooks so you can start downloading right now. The books are available in all major eBook formats.

Follow this link to see an online version of the flowchart, complete with links to the the individual books.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

One of history’s hushed up literary disputes is in the process of being investigated by Tonto Fielding. At Magdalen College, Oxford, Oscar Wilde openly scorned "manly" sports though he occasionally boxed. It was during this period that Wilde happened to overhear fellow student, John Cawte Beaglehole, disparage Walter Pate’s “Studies in the History of the Renaissance,” which Wilde had claimed, “has had such a strange influence over my life.” What Tonto has uncovered, is that Wilde knocked Beaglehole out with one punch. I have concluded after much research, that in fact it was not a fixed fight, as some have suggested. In retrospect, it has become quite clear throughout boxing history that some of its greatest fighters have all had a propensity for languishing attitudes and showy costumes, a tradition that Wilde clearly originated.

Tired of reading about Jersey Shore book deals? Literature has finally struck back.

In the video embedded above, two stars of an Oscar Wilde play on Broadway launched a video series–reading Jersey Shore dialogue in the style of Wilde’s play.

Here’s more about the video: “What if the characters of Broadway’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” traveled through a time warp and woke up on the beach with Snooki, The Situation and the rest of the gang of MTV’s Jersey Shore? In an exclusive video series created for Playbill by ‘Earnest’ stars Santino Fontana and David Furr, the Roundabout Theatre Company cast puts “Jersey” in the mouths of Oscar Wilde’s famed Britons. Think of it as a comedy of bad manners.” (Via)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

When I first started to work for New York Public Library I was placed at an amazing near 150-year-old part of the system called the Jefferson Market Branch in Greenwich Village.  My husband once shot a fantastic short film there in the clocktower, and I believe a Law & Order episode took place there once involving a man and a sword.  This little PSA is also set there and takes advantage not only of the architecture (gorgeous, right?) but also my former boss Frank who takes great glee in his role as Library Ghoul.  Love you, Frank!

I’m not entirely certain the universe is big enough for me to imagine Weird Al and Shel Silverstein having a conversation with one another.  But huge thanks to Mr. Schu for this amazing piece of info.

I would have watched Uncle Shelby’s Corner.  Absolutely, you bet!

Recently I was asked to blurb a new edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant.  Now normally I’d think twice about that kind of request because, let’s face it, Oscar Wilde was one weird children’s author.  We sometimes think of Hans Christian Andersen as an odd duck (Red Shoes, anyone?) but I doubt he ever created much of anything to compare to The Happy Prince and its ilk.  The Selfish Giant has always been way too didactic for my tastes (too much of an allegory) but there is a way to make it palatable.  First off, you give the book great art.  Then, if possible, you hire an orchestra and turn the book into a kind of Peter and the Wolf type gig.  Here’s a taste.

Cool, eh?

I wouldn’t call this next video of a jazzed up version of The Three Bears any real threat to Hey There, Little Red Riding Hood, but it’s still interesting.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the link!

This week I was pleased to be asked to come up with a list of great Black History Month titles for our local channel NY1’s coverage of what to read with your kids.  Fellow librarian Robyn Mutnick did a top notch job of presenting the books themselves.

I should note that there was one change made to the books I recommended

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As we journey farther into the New Year, we’ve been reflecting on all the wonderful books published in 2010, and in doing so, we’ve also realized there are some classics worth revisiting. The authors and friends of Oxford University Press are proud to present this series of essays, drawing our attention to books both new and old. Below, Anatoly Liberman (the Oxford Etymologist) encourages us to read The Portrait of Mr. W.H.

By Anatoly Liberman

Oscar Wilde is most often quoted for his infinite wit, and those who know him are mainly aware of his comedies.  Some people are still charmed by his fairy tales (“The Happy Prince” and a few others; you should have seen how my undergraduate students – those poor products of popular culture – listen to this story!) and cannot shake off the attraction of The Picture of Dorian Gray.  But usually he is mentioned, if at all, in the context of his innumerable mannerisms, the overblown cult of the beautiful, homosexuality, and tragic imprisonment.  The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a famous title, but I wonder who reads the poem today.  More than anything else, Wilde wanted to sound brilliant, which did not cost him the least effort, because he was brilliant.  His paradoxes have become proverbial. In the form of hundreds of familiar quotations they serve as epigraphs to articles and books by our contemporaries—an incautious idea, for beside such an epigraph the rest looks pitifully ordinary.  Deafened by a cascade of paradoxes or touched to tears by sentimental dramas, even some of Wilde’s admirers did not notice that their favorite author was one of the cleverest men in the history of English letters.

My never-ending attempts to translate Shakespeare’s sonnets into Russian have recently returned me to many works I read years ago and remembered but dimly. One of them was Wilde’s essay The Portrait of Mr. W.H. It is a “novella” about the enigmatic man whom Shakespeare or his publisher called the only begetter of the sonnets.  There have been countless attempts to discover the “beauteous youth,” Shakespeare’s main addressee.  All of them failed, but it is obvious why Oscar Wilde was intrigued by the figure of the young man, the “master-mistress” of Shakespeare’s passion, the lord of his soul.  I could repeat the main line of Wilde’s reasoning, but over the years the details have faded from my memory, and now that I know so much more about the sonnets and about those who tried to read them like Shakespeare’s diary than I knew decades ago, I am immediately struck by the ingenuity and elegance of Wilde’s reconstruction.  He was familiar with all the important publications on the sonnets and studied them from the original editions.  With his photographic memory, he, most probably, knew all 154 of them by heart.  His arguments are irresistible.  Of course, Shakespeare told us that the youth’s name was the same as his, that is, William, but from lines like “a man in hue, all men in hues controlling” Wilde concluded that the lover’s name was Willie Hughes, a boy-actor in Shakespeare’s company.

However, The Portrait of Mr. W.H. is a story with its own plot.  It is about two people who hope to find some evidence that Willie Hughes existed.  Then suddenly the young man’s portrait turns up, but it is a forgery produced under the most bizarre circumstances by the investigator himself, to convince his friend!  The quest kills both men; yet they did not live for nothing.  We are in the world of Oscar Wilde in which art is more precious than reality, for reality can only imitate art.  No sacrifice is great enough if it is made for art’s sake.  The deadly spirit of make

The Google Doodle team honored two writers in select countries last Friday. Oscar Wilde received a mysterious Dorian Gray-style doodle in honor of his 156th birthday. The Google team incorporated Arabic script into the logo to honor the birthday of poet Ahmad Shawqi (both embedded above, via).

Wilde’s most notable works include The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray. To this day, he is widely considered to be iconic in the gay community. He passed away at age 40 in 1900 from cerebral meningitis.

Shawqi was known primarily as a poet. He was particularly known in the Arabic literature community for being the first to write poetic plays. The play which gave him the most fame and recognition was the tragedy, The Death of Cleopatra.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

I've mentioned before what a great extemporaneous speaker Stephen Fry is. This morning I enjoyed his latest "podgram," entitled "Wallpaper."

After some initial meandering, Fry settles in, with his usual eloquence and beautiful, sonorous voice, to discuss Oscar Wilde and his critical involvement in the aesthetic movement.

Fry summarizes aestheticism as viewing the world not in terms of good versus evil, but rather beautiful versus ugly. Nature with its sunsets, its snowy peaks, its fantastic flora and fauna, is beautiful; all ugliness in the world is due to the interference of humankind. But if we view ourselves as only able to mar Nature's perfection, unable to create anything beautiful of our own, hopelessness sets in. What is to stop us, to loosely quote Fry, from crapping in our own nests? That is why, when Oscar Wilde said Americans were so violent because our wallpaper was ugly, he was not simply making a flippant remark.

Recently I was involved in a discussion with other writers about why we write. This was my basic argument: that in writing, as in any other pursuit, you have to believe you have something to offer, some improvement to make (no matter how infintessimal), or you might as well give up—on life, on everything. I believe writing is one way humankind can make the world more beautiful. Writing might also be moral or utilitarian, but in the case of novels, at least, I'm with the aesthetes: I believe their main purpose is to be enjoyed. And I believe the act of writing itself is a way of seeking the truth, making sense of the world from all its clamor—to quote Wildes's "Hélas!":

Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God...

And though scholars disagree on the precise meaning of the final lines of aesthetic forerunner John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," I'll twist them to my own aesthetic ends by concluding thusly:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"—that is all
Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.

Catch this week's Poetry Friday round-up at The Well-Read Child!

autumm
Originally uploaded by elffzart.

SFG prompted me to update my blog masthead, using some autumn leaves I painted in my scientific illustration days. I rarely have the time these days to paint in such detail.

Finally finished! If you pop over here, you can see a horrifying photo of the desk from whence this painting sprang. I'm in pre-show mode, so everything's nuts.
-Claire, queen of the links

I love this season!