Book briefs: A long-lost Shakespeare play and penguins in love
Welcome to your weekly roundup of book news and literary highlights from The Thread.
This week, a new play is added to Shakespeare's canon and controversy erupts over exactly what defines science fiction.
The Library of Congress opens its archives
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Listen up: The Library of Congress is putting its extensive Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature online. That means you can stream Robert Frost and Kurt Vonnegut reading from their own work without leaving your couch.
The online resource launches today with 50 recordings; the library plans to add additional material every month. The archive stretches back to 1943, so we can only imagine the treasures it holds: Gwendolyn Brooks, Czeslaw Milosz, Allen Tate and more.
Gay penguins continue to draw parents' ire
In 1998, at New York's Central Park Zoo, love struck. Roy and Silo, two male chinstrap penguins, fell for each other.
When another penguin couple had an extra egg they couldn't care for, a zookeeper gave it to Roy and Silo. They watched over it, cared for it, and when it hatched, they raised the baby penguin, which the zoo named Tango.
In 2006, Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson published "And Tango Makes Three," a picture book that teaches children about different relationships and tolerance — and controversy has been raging ever since.
"And Tango Makes Three" made a repeat appearance on the American Library Association's list of frequently challenged books this year, for "promoting a homosexual agenda."
To see the whole list of challenged and banned books, visit the American Library Association.
The world of science fiction prepares for battle
George R.R. Martin is embroiled in a fantasy battle, but this one has nothing to do with his "Game of Thrones" series. It's a complicated story, and emotions are running high amongst fans of sci-fi and fantasy, but we'll try to break it down.
The Hugo Awards are essentially the Oscars of sci-fi and fantasy fiction. Fans nominate and vote for the winners — fans, that is, who purchase a membership to Worldcon, a sci-fi convention. Anyone who purchases a membership gains voting power.
Last year, the Hugo Awards were praised for their diverse range of winning works. For genres that have long been dominated by white male writers, many sci-fi and fantasy fans celebrated the change.
Some readers, however, felt their tastes were no longer being represented. This year, a group banded together and campaigned for a specific slate of nominees. The group succeeded in pushing almost all of them through, and it's yielded a very different lineup than last year's.
Many, including Martin, are not pleased with the result, claiming talented authors were overlooked for the sake of politics.
The Hugo Awards, which is inteded to be a celebration of the imagination, has instead become a heated battle for control of the genre — we'll have to see how it plays out.
What play through yonder window breaks?
Hold on to your doublets, there's a new Shakespeare play afoot. A long-lost drama by the Bard has been uncovered, thanks to a computer.
The only surviving copy of the play in question is an adaptation called "Double Falsehood," published by Lewis Theobald 300 years ago. Theobald always acknowledged that his work was a Shakespeare adaptation, but no one was able to confirm that — mainly because they had no original work to compare it to.
Enter the computer. Two researchers at the University of Texas fed a series of Shakespeare's texts into a software trained to identify an author's "psychological fingerprints." They claim that by studying the particular placement of ye's and thee's and thou's, among other words, the software can distinguish who wrote it.
After running "Double Falsehood" through the software, the researchers are convinced that Shakespeare did write it — but with some help. They think he collaborated with fellow playwright John Fletcher, whose literary fingerprints also pop up throughout the text.
If this is true, what happened to the original? Some think it burned in a fire, others suggest it was suppressed due to its risque subject matter. The final theory? Shakespeare just didn't think it was very good.