Literary Journal
by Scotty Villhard What turns a swindler into a con artist? What separates your ordinary robbers from your gentleman thieves? What is the distinction between a burglary and a heist? Media is full of these confidence folk, criminals of the finest quality. They can be found in films like Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and novels like…
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by Stephanie Pickrell As a writer and an English major, the word “canon” is my biggest pet peeve. Not the kind of canon that determines which books are considered among the “great works” of a genre (although who decided that, anyway?), but the kind found most often in fanfiction forums. It’s a relatively new word,…
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by Christie Basson These quotes are meant to encourage, uplift, and celebrate women today by remembering the generations who came and wrote before us. Spanning more than four thousand years, these words have traveled time and space to find us, penned by individuals who have experienced every walk of life. Written by women of all…
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From Frankenstein to Firefly, science fiction has taken many forms and encompassed all different kinds of stories. This means that there is boundless potential for creativity under a very broad umbrella, but it does make it hard to pin down exactly what someone means when they talk about science fiction. As a previous Hothouse article…
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by Megan Snopik In Virginia Woolf’s famous essay, A Room of One’s Own, she attempts – in preparation of two lectures intended for female college students – to answer why, as of 1929, there have not been as many great female writers as male. Praised in its second-wave feminist heyday, this essay was crucial to…
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This Valentine’s Day, we asked our website writers to contribute the real-life love stories of those who write literature. Whether it’s a tale of happily ever after or heartbreaking rejection, read on to discover some of the romantic adventures of the authors we still read today. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scotty Villhard In the novel The Great…
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by Abdallah Hussein Books have never been more likely to be adapted into films than they are at present. With the rapid growth and advancement of the film industry, this practice doesn’t seem likely to wind down anytime soon either with recent fan-favorites such as Bridgerton, Little Women, and The Queen’s Gambit dominating our social…
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by Scotty Villhard I’m about to spoil Station Eleven, Casablanca, Dracula, and The Importance of Being Earnest for you, so if you don’t want that to happen, go read Station Eleven (and those other ones too, I guess). My fascination with literary coincidences began in June of 2020. It had been a while since I…
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Written by Kylie Warkentin There are few things as universal to the human experience as the pleasure of sharing a meal with a loved one. The kinetic affair of its creation, the care in overseeing its bake time, the pleasure in seeing it mix, sizzle, rise—and then tumble down into the sweet mouth of someone…
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Written by Pramika Kadari As an English major, I’m nervous to admit that The Hunger Games: Mockingjay is one of my favorite books in the world because it’s labeled as a young adult book. In the world of readers, many look down on YA books as being childish, trashy entertainment, or simply not intellectually stimulating.…
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Written by Skylar Epstein The year is 2012 and Joss Whedon’s Avengers just came out. You, as an avid comic reader, go into the theater wielding comparisons to the comics, ready and willing to fill in the backstory of each character for your less informed friends. Then it’s 2013, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, a spin-off…
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Written by Abdallah Hussein The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is an unusual, tragic, and (most relevantly) suffocating circumstance. Going into 2020, I was optimistic at the prospect of the undiscovered, but I could never have imagined myself isolated in my home for unearthly amounts of time, knowing one unlucky excursion out my front door could result…
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