Many know of Walt Whitman as America’s first true poet and the liberator of American literature. What many might not know is that Whitman did not emerge on the literary […]
How NOT to treat our books
Don’t you love to sit down with a good book, or better yet, a book that’s crucial to your research, and find that someone before you has treated it like […]
The Hobbit
As you’ve no doubt heard, The Hobbit (first published in 1937) will soon be coming to a theater near you. Not once, but three times. Each of J.R.R. Tolkien’s three […]
Autumn Light
As we settle into the new semester, the oppressive heat of the summer sun has eased as we rush past the autumnal equinox, and our wobbling top of a planet […]
Introducing Mo Yan
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 was awarded to the Chinese author, Mo Yan. Mo Yan is perhaps best known to the Western audience through a successful film adaptation of […]
Getting EBL E-books
What’s EBL, and why should I care? EBL (Electronic Book Library) is one of the JHU libraries’ e-book “packages” that we buy so that you can have access to many, […]
Happy 101st!
The world of 20th-century Irish literature can feel dominated by certain giants looming over the rest; Joyce, Beckett, Yeats, and Heaney have, and deserve, their impressive positions. Nonetheless, certain names […]
China in Ten Words
How is it possible to summarize a country as complex as China in ten words? Yu Hua, a renowned novelist in China, did just that. In his first work of […]
The End of the Book?
If someone said that recent technological advances made the printed book, as the conveyor of knowledge and information, obsolete, would you think this prediction a recent one? What about a […]
Company Histories: Heroes & Happy Endings
Many of us have been entertained in recent years by newspaper and television reports, books, and even biopics about how clever e-entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook and Steve […]