Culture
What to Know About the New ‘Hunger Games’ Prequel, ‘Sunrise on the Reaping’

What is Panem?
Panem is a fictionalized, future version of the United States. People in the country’s 12 districts, which loosely correspond to regions of the U.S., toil to supply resources to the Capitol, where the rich and powerful live. (“In school, they tell us the Capitol was built in a place once called the Rockies. District 12 was in a region known as Appalachia,” Katniss says in “The Hunger Games.”)
In the poorest district, 12, people regularly starve to death or die in coal mining accidents. Capitol citizens, on the other hand, are so wealthy that some people take tonics to make themselves throw up so they can feast on even more food. They are known for their outlandish fashion and are waited on by avoxes, enslaved people who have had their tongues cut out as punishment for treason.
About 74 years before the events of the first “Hunger Games” book, the districts rebelled against the Capitol. The ensuing civil war culminated in the Capitol obliterating the most powerful district, 13. After the rebellion, the government created the Hunger Games to punish and control the remaining districts.
What are the Hunger Games?
Every year on July 4, all district children between the ages of 12 and 18 are entered into a lottery, and one boy and one girl from each region are selected to compete in the Hunger Games. The “tributes” must battle one another in an arena to the death; the one left standing is rewarded with riches, as is his or her district.
In “The Hunger Games,” Katniss competes in the 74th Hunger Games. The televised competition, which is required viewing for all citizens, includes a macabre sort of athlete’s parade, interviews, opportunities for betting on and sponsoring the tributes and technical spectacle within the arena, including planned weather events and bioengineered creatures, or “mutts.” Katniss and Peeta Mellark, the other District 12 tribute, become the first joint victors; in “Catching Fire,” they and other previous winners must return to the arena to compete in the 75th Games, also called the third Quarter Quell.

Culture
Test Your Memory of These Classic Books for Young Readers

Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s tests your memory of books you may have read during your school days — specifically, the plots of much-loved novels for young readers. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books.
Culture
Test Yourself on These Cartoons and Comics Adapted for the Screen

Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights cartoons and comic strips that were later adapted for the screen. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and some of their filmed versions.
Culture
I Want This Jane Kenyon Poem Read Aloud at My Funeral

You can hear a reading of this poem at the bottom of the page.
“The Pond at Dusk”: It’s a title that presents an image of calm, touched with the faintest shimmer of dread. You might picture a peaceful summer evening in the countryside somewhere, but you might also feel the tug of a somber metaphor in the word “dusk.” Night is falling, and this poem proceeds, nimbly and observantly, toward an unsentimental confrontation with death.
In one called “Twilight: After Haying” — there’s that dusk again — she writes that “the soul / must part from the body: / what else could it do?” What else indeed. This fatalism provides its own kind of solace. “The day comes at last.” The end is inevitable, inarguable, and there may be a balm in acknowledging that fact.
Not that “The Pond at Dusk” quite dispenses such consolation. It isn’t Kenyon’s style to offer homilies or lessons. Instead, she watches, with sympathetic detachment, standing back from the implications of her words and letting them ripple outward, toward the reader.
This is not the kind of nature poetry that gazes in wonder at the glories of creation, taking the world as a mirror of the poet’s ego. Kenyon parcels out her attention carefully, removing herself from the picture as rigorously as a landscape painter at her easel.
The Pond at Dusk
A fly wounds the water but the wound
soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter overhead, dropping now and then toward
the outward–radiating evidence of food.
The green haze on the trees changes
into leaves, and what looks like smoke floating over the neighbor’s barn
is only apple blossoms.
But sometimes what looks like disaster
is disaster: the day comes at last, and the men struggle with the casket
just clearing the pews.
Listen to A.O. Scott read the poem.
THE POND AT DUSK by Jane Kenyon
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