Indigenous Languages, Indigenous Voices

Want to try out some new recipes in 2021? Penn professor Heather Sharkey recommends these cookbooks, which she uses in her course titled Food in the Islamic Middle East, a seminar that approaches past and present Middle Eastern and North African societies through food. You can find all of at the Penn Libraries, and many have digital editions available.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Happy new year—and happy Public Domain Day! Starting today, creative works published in the United States in 1925 enter the public domain, which means that they will be free for all to use, build upon, and adapt. Works include The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, the film Lovers in Quarantine, and many songs by “Empress of the Blues" Bessie Smith.

Looking for a music recommendation for the new year? Music librarian Richard Griscom recommends Jean Sibelius’s Symphony no. 7, which enters the public domain on January 1. "The musical ideas are condensed and compressed, and it takes a while to unpack, but on repeated hearings you begin to realize that one bit here shows up again later in a very different context, and it all starts to make more sense. And the music can be appreciated on a surface level, too. Each time I hear it, at certain points I’m reminded of the churning of the sea."

This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang, but with a whimper." — T.S. Elliot, Hollow Men. First published in its current form in a poetry collection in 1925, T.S. Elliot's The Hollow Men is one of hundreds of creative works that will enter the public domain on January 1st. The first edition of that 1925 collection in the Penn Libraries includes the note, "Published 23 November 1925 at 7s 6d; 1460 copies printed."