By Taylor Jasmine | On August 7, 2021 | Updated August 29, 2022 | Comments (0)
Coup De Grâce by Marguerite Yourcenar is this noted French author’s 1939 novella, her second such work following Alexis (1929). In a 1988 interview in Paris Review, Yourcenar reveals that the novella’s lead female, Sophie, is very close to herself at twenty.
The brief but emotionally devastating story is of the love triangle between three young people affected by the civil war between the White Russians and the Bolsheviks: Erick and Conrad, best friends from childhood; and Sophie, who is burdened with an unrequited love for Conrad. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On August 2, 2021 | Updated August 29, 2022 | Comments (0)
Memoirs of Hadrian, a novel by Marguerite Yourcenar, the Belgian-born French writer, was first published in France in 1951. Originally written in French, it was published in English in 1954. It was an ambitious project many year in the making; Yourcenar first had the idea for it in the 1920s, then worked on it, on and off, in the 1930s.
Many years in gestation, it was a book that, with the benefit of hindsight, she didn’t think she could have written when she was younger. “There are books,” she said later, “which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.”
Considered this author’s masterwork, and the book she’s best remembered for, it was from the start a critical success. The novel, told from a first person person by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, begins with a letter to his adoptive grandson, who became Marcus Aurelius and his successor. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On July 26, 2021 | Updated August 27, 2022 | Comments (0)
Among the works Rachel Field (1894 – 1942) created for children, the most celebrated and enduring is Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, published in 1929.
Written in the voice of a 100-year-old doll telling her life story, it gave Field the distinction of being the first woman to win a Newbery Medal (1930). It also received the acclaimed Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.
Hitty enjoyed a long life in print. The 1959 MacMillan Company version (which went into several editions over the next several decades), with the original illustrations by Dorothy P. Lathrop, describes the book as follows: Read More→
By Melanie P. Kumar | On July 6, 2021 | Updated May 1, 2025 | Comments (5)
Amrita Pritam (1919 – 2005) was a poet, novelist, and essayist, with a huge body of work to her credit. So it’s surprising that her autobiography is just under two hundred pages, and it’s curious why she chose this particular title — The Revenue Stamp.
Behind the name is the exchange between Amrita and the famous author and journalist, Khushwant Singh, who told her that her life was of so little consequence that it could be written on the back of a revenue stamp (‘Raseedi Ticket’ in the original).
When choosing the name for her autobiography, Amrita recalled this banter and opted for this name. Credit must be given to the English translator, Krishna Gorowara, who seems to have picked up on all the nuances and depth of Amrita’s thoughts. Read More→
By Lynne Weiss | On May 2, 2021 | Updated June 19, 2026 | Comments (0)
The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers illuminates the life and significance of Phillis Wheatley Peters, the enslaved African American whose 1773 book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, challenged prevailing assumptions about the intellectual and moral abilities of Africans and women.
In The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which won the 2021 NAACP Image Award for “Outstanding Literary Work—Poetry” and was long-listed for the National Book Award, Jeffers portrays the life of the poet both before she was taken from her home in West Africa and throughout her lifetime in the United States, first enslaved and later free.
I became aware of the book by attending a virtual reading and can attest that Jeffers’s reading style is dynamic and worth searching out in audio and video recordings on the internet. Read More→
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