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Eliot’s Darker Side, and Other News

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On the Shelf

Thomas_Stearns_Eliot_with_his_sister_and_his_cousin_by_Lady_Ottoline_Morrell

Eliot in 1934, photographed by Lady Ottoline Morrell.

  • “Everyone wants to be clever—it’s hard to give up that side and go blindly for stupidity. But even more frightening was the fact that it was so easy … I guess I have a talent for humiliation.” An interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard.
  • On the shortlist for Britain’s new Folio Prize, open to all English-language writers: Rachel Kushner, Anne Carson, Sergio de la Pava, George Saunders, and more.
  • Since T. S. Eliot has been lionized as Britain’s favorite poet, let’s all take a step back and remember: he was one of the most “daemonic poets who ever lived.”
  • “O where are they now, your harridan nuns / who thumped on young heads with a metal thimble / and punished with rulers your upturned palms”: RIP Pulitzer-winning poet Maxine Kumin, who died last week, at eighty-eight.