Latest posts
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Nolan’s Odyssey: An Honest, Long Review
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a real achievement — and a flawed one. An honest, long review: the pre-release outrage from people who hadn’t seen it, Anne Hathaway’s Penelope, the missing sunlight, the ‘Nobody’ scene Nolan cut, and the argument about the cast nobody makes calmly.
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The Decadents: Wilde, Dorian Gray, and Art for Art’s Sake
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” So Wilde announced in the preface to The…
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The Picaresque: Don Quixote, Gargantua, and the Comic Road
Before the novel was respectable, it was a vagabond. The form we now teach in universities and bind in cloth began its life in the gutter, in the company…
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Sea Stories: Melville, Conrad, and the Ocean as Fate
There is a kind of book that cannot happen on land. Not because the action requires water, but because the sea does something to character that a drawing…
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Machado de Assis: The Greatest Writer You Haven’t Read
Imagine a novelist who, in the 1880s, in a country most of his future readers could not find on a map, sat down and wrote a book narrated by a dead man,…
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Gargantua and Pantagruel: Rabelais and the Comedy of Excess
The word survives even where the books do not. We call a joke, a feast, a belly laugh “Rabelaisian,” and most people who use the adjective have never read…
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Rafael Sabatini and the Art of the Swashbuckler
“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” It is one of the great opening sentences in popular fiction, and it tells you…
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Madame Bovary: Flaubert and the Birth of Realism
In 1857 the French state put a novel on trial for offending public morality, and lost. The novel was Madame Bovary, the author was Gustave Flaubert, and…
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Gulliver’s Travels: Swift’s Savage Comedy
There is a particular cruelty in what publishing did to Gulliver’s Travels. We handed it to children. We made it a wall decoration, a nursery frieze of a…
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The King James Bible as English Literature
Read these words aloud: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” Eleven words, ten of them of one syllable, the eleventh borrowed for an…