Dec 28 2025
New Year’s Eve has everything a movie needs: anticipation, crowded parties, unexpected reunions, romantic possibilities, regrets about the year that is ending, and the irresistible feeling that life might somehow look different when the clock strikes twelve. It is no wonder filmmakers have returned to December 31 again and again. Some movies unfold almost entirely …
Dec 28 2025
On December 28, 1934, Alasdair Gray was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He would become one of the most original figures in modern Scottish culture—a novelist, painter, playwright, poet, illustrator, muralist, designer, teacher, and political writer whose imagination transformed the way his native city appeared on the literary map. Gray did not publish his first novel …
Dec 27 2025
Born on December 27, 1910, Charles Olson became one of the most adventurous and influential figures in postwar American poetry. He was a poet, essayist, teacher, literary scholar, political thinker, and tireless researcher whose work pushed against conventional ideas about what a poem should look like, how it should move, and what kinds of knowledge …
Dec 26 2025
On December 26, 1716, Thomas Gray was born in London. He would publish relatively little poetry during his lifetime, avoid the public literary career that might have been expected of a writer of his reputation, and even turn down the opportunity to become Poet Laureate. Yet one poem ensured that his name would endure. Elegy …
Dec 25 2025
December 25, 1925, is generally accepted as the birth date of Carlos Castaneda, the Peruvian-born writer whose books about an elusive Indigenous sorcerer named Don Juan Matus became international bestsellers and helped shape the spiritual counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Even that apparently simple statement requires a qualification. Castaneda spent much of his adult …
Dec 24 2025
On December 24, 1822, Matthew Arnold was born in Laleham, England. He would grow into one of the most important literary figures of the Victorian age, building an unusual reputation that rests almost equally upon his poetry and his work as a critic of literature, education, religion, and society. Today, Arnold is most widely remembered …
Dec 23 2025
On December 23, 1962, Trần Anh Hùng was born in Đà Nẵng, South Vietnam. Over the decades that followed, he would become one of the most internationally acclaimed filmmakers of Vietnamese origin, creating an unusually elegant body of work in which food, memory, desire, family, silence, landscape, and the smallest gestures of everyday life can …
Dec 22 2025
On December 22, 1905, Kenneth Rexroth was born in South Bend, Indiana. Over the next 76 years, he would become one of the most unusual and influential figures in twentieth-century American poetry: a largely self-educated poet, translator, critic, painter, political radical, environmental thinker, radio personality, jazz collaborator, and mentor whose San Francisco home became one …
Dec 21 2025
On December 21, 1926, Arnošt Lustig was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Years later, his birthday offers an opportunity to remember one of the most important Czech-Jewish writers of the twentieth century—a novelist, short-story writer, journalist, screenwriter, teacher, and Holocaust survivor who spent much of his literary life trying to find language for experiences that seemed …
Dec 20 2025
On January 10, 1917, Cahit Külebi was born in Çeltek, a village in the Zile district of Tokat in northern-central Anatolia. Over the course of the twentieth century, he would become one of modern Turkey’s most distinctive poets—a writer who blended the directness and musical qualities of Turkish folk poetry with the freedoms of modern …
