Everything Is Better With Dragons

Every month Simone Kaplan answers questions in her newsletter that people send into her. I thought the one she answered this month was a good one that you would be interested in reading. Here it is:

Question: Let’s say a number of good manuscripts come into an editor’s office. All have good grammar, good punctuation, etc.; and all are by first-time writers. In other words, all things are equal. What would make one manuscript stand out so much that the editor would want to publish it? Donna R

Simone’s Answer: First, Donna, I have a question for you: when was the last time you walked into a bookstore and asked for a book with “good grammar, good punctuation, etc.”?

I thought so!

Good grammar, clear sentences, and a cohesive structure are the basic requirements of a manuscript. Without them the manuscript doesn’t stand a chance of publication.

So let’s turn…

Everyone knows Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Richard III (or knows of them at least). Even Richard II, As You Like It, and Antony and Cleopatra can be said to be well-known William Shakespeare plays. But what about the others? He wrote or collaborated on nearly forty, after all. Here are ten of the least-known plays by the Bard, with the reasons why people should read them (or reread them), along with an interesting fact about each. We hope you enjoy them. If you like this list, be sure to check out our follow-up pick of Shakespeare’s ten best plays (complete with interesting trivia about them) our interesting facts about Shakespeare too.

1. King John. This is one of the Bard’s least-performed plays, although it was popular with the Victorians because of its pageantry and medieval pomp. Nevertheless, the play has been…

Our previous post, on ‘Ten Words We Got from Literature’, was so popular with readers that we have decided to write a sequel. We had several great suggestions from readers which we’ve incorporated into this list. As with the previous post, we’re interested only in words which have a definite origin in a literary work.

By Laura Linker

Phillis Wheatley (1753-84), an eighteenth-century black slave taught to read by her owners, composed over 100 poems in her lifetime, many of them drawing on the Bible as a source of infallible authority. The first slave to publish a book, Wheatley often urges America to repent of its participation in the slave trade. (She was also the originator of ‘Columbia’ as a term for America, which she invented in her 1776 poem ‘To His Excellency George Washington’.) Steeped in western canonical authors, including Ovid, Virgil, Shakespeare, and Milton, she draws on classical and religious allusions to challenge legal and social limitations that denigrate slaves, adopting established poetical forms only to use them as sites of resistance. Her poetry demonstrates remarkable technique and learning.

One of her most interesting poems, ‘On Imagination’, employs art as a means of freeing the mind and the muse, conceptualized as a figure…

The word ‘tweet’ – meaning to post a message or item of information on Twitter – has this month (June 2013) been added to the Oxford English Dictionary or OED. In honour of this occasion, we thought we’d offer some interesting facts about terms associated with Twitter, and the stories surrounding their earlier uses. Many of them have a literary connection.

The word ‘tweet’ – as a verb – is first attested in 1851. It may have been in use earlier than this, but the OED cites 1851 as the earliest known date of the verb’s use. The word features in a poem by George Meredith, novelist and poet, author of Victorian sonnet sequence Modern Love. (Meredith was also the author of the poem ‘The Lark Ascending’, which would later inspire Ralph Vaughan Williams to compose his celebrated piece of music.)

The poem, one of Meredith’s ‘Pastorals’, contains the lines:…

I started reading this book last week during my mother’s visit, and I was probably thirty-five pages in when I stopped and asked her if she read a lot of Swedish authors. She told me she hadn’t (and claimed it wasn’t at all because she was Norwegian); she wondered why I had asked such a question, and I said I was having a little trouble getting into Jonasson’s book. I felt, I told her, the same way I did when I tried to read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – everyone told me it was great, but I couldn’t get further than the first sixty pages. The style was just so…reserved.

I was struggling with the same issue when it came to this book. I liked the protagonist well enough that I was going to plow onward, but it made me wonder if these two books were a reflection…