“It turned out that the most successful Christmas records tended to have two common qualities: catchy, upbeat melodies and imagined unlikely scenarios for anthropomorphized yuletide characters.” Move over, Frosty! It’s beginning to look a lot like … an unseasonably warm December. Here is a brief history of Christmas songs and of their often-surprising rise from corny kitsch to global sensation.
Baby It’s Warm Outside
Miss Whatsit
Director Ava Duvernay has found the lead for her film adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. Thirteen-year-old Storm Reid will play the lead role of the character Meg Murry, joining a cast that includes Mindy Kaling, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon.
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Kafka’s last living friend remembers
Alice Herz-Sommer, a 106-year-old Holocaust survivor and the last living person who knew Franz Kafka personally, reminisces about her friend in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: “Kafka was a slightly strange man…”
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Literary Rivalry
“‘I think she is better than J. L. Borges—who is good, but not all that good!” said poet Elizabeth Bishop of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Bishop was one of Lispector’s first English translators, but also one of her fiercest critics. Alexandra Pechman writes for the Poetry Foundation about their literary rivalry and grudging respect. Pair with Magdalena Edwards’s Millions review of Lispector’s The Complete Stories.
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