Latest posts
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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…
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Don Quixote: The First Modern Novel
A middle-aged gentleman in a parched corner of La Mancha reads too many chivalric romances, decides the world is one, and rides out to make it so. That is…
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What Nolan Has to Work With: The Odyssey as a Filmmaker’s Epic
When Christopher Nolan announced that his next film, due in 2026, would be The Odyssey, the reaction told you something about how little most people…
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The Hero’s Journey: How the Odyssey Became the Template for Every Story
Sometime in the late 1940s, a comparative-mythology professor named Joseph Campbell read his way through the world’s stories — the Buddha under the bo…
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The House of Atreus: The Curse That Became Greek Tragedy
No family in Greek myth is as thoroughly damned as the house of Atreus, and no curse in the literature does as much work. It begins with a man who tried…
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Gatekeepers of Fascism: How Authoritarianism Gets Normalized
Authoritarian regimes are not, in the modern era, usually built by authoritarians. They are built by the people who were supposed to stop them. This is…
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The Brontë Sisters: One Family, Seven Novels, and a Myth
Read on its own, Wuthering Heights looks like a book that fell out of the sky — a work of such concentrated strangeness that it seems to have no…