Latest posts
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Heart of Darkness: Conrad and the Horror of Empire
There is a moment, two-thirds of the way up the river, when Marlow finds a book. It is an old volume on seamanship, annotated in the margins in what he…
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Dashiell Hammett and the Invention of Hard-Boiled Crime
Before Dashiell Hammett, the detective was a brain in a chair. Poe’s Dupin reasoned out crimes from his armchair; Conan Doyle’s Holmes deduced a man’s…
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H.P. Lovecraft and the Birth of Cosmic Horror
Most horror flatters us. It assumes that human beings matter enough to be worth tormenting — that there is a vengeful ghost who cares about us, a…
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Kafka’s Metamorphosis: Waking Up as a Verminous Insect
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” It is among the most famous…
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The Age of Innocence: Wharton and the Cage of Society
Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence in 1921, the first woman to take it, and she won it for a novel set fifty years in the past,…
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The Aeneid: Virgil’s Answer to Homer
Virgil began the Aeneid on a commission and died wanting it burned. Both facts matter, and the second is the more honest gloss on the first. Augustus had…
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H.G. Wells: The Man Who Invented the Future
In the space of five years — between 1895 and 1898 — a young, sickly, lower-middle-class Englishman who had trained as a science teacher…
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The Hammer and the Fire: How the Witch Hunts Happened
Between roughly 1450 and 1750, somewhere on the order of forty to sixty thousand people in Europe and its colonies were executed for the crime of…
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Moby-Dick: Why the Great American Novel Is About a Whale
It is the strangest fact in American literature: the country’s candidate for the greatest novel ever written by one of its citizens is a book about…
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Charles Dickens: Where to Start With the Great Victorian
Most people meet Dickens through abridgment, adaptation, or a school assignment they resented, which means most people have never met Dickens at all. They…