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| Gregory Peck in the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird. |
Harper Lee's principled and compassionate hero Atticus Finch topped both
Mental Floss's "Best Parents in Literature" list and the
Christian Science Monitor's "15 books with memorable dads for Father's Day" list last weekend. Don't miss our
50th-anniversary editionof
To Kill a Mockingbird, which is selling out fast. Read more
Daily Glean coverage
here on why Lee's only novel is so enduringly popular.
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| James Joyce by Berenice Abbott. Paris, 1926 |
Most modern lit mavens will be aware of the significance of June 16: often called "Bloomsday" after the book's hero Leopold Bloom, it marks the date on which
Ulysses by James Joyce is set. In addition, it commemorates the date on which Joyce first walked out with his future wife, Nora Barnacle. Some hardy folks get together to read the entire opus; others make pilgrimages around Dublin to spots visited in the novel by Bloom, his wife Molly, and Stephen Daedalus. According to
The Guardian, "Every year hundreds of Dubliners dress as characters from the book ... as if to assert their willingness to become one with the text. It is quite impossible to imagine any other masterpiece of modernism having quite such an effect on the life of a city." Read more
Daily Glean background on Bloomsday
here, and hear a recording of Molly Bloom's famous final soliloquy. Also, have you read the
Memoirs of writer
Italo Svevo, a friend of Joyce and some say a model for Leopold Bloom?
Above left: illustration from a 1998 edition of
Ulysses by Mimmo Paladino.
