Latest posts
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Ahab: Literature’s Greatest Monomaniac
Return to Moby-Dick and it is not the whale that haunts you but the man. On Ahab, the greatest portrait of obsession in literature.
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Pope’s Odyssey: The Translation That Made Homer Sing
‘A pretty poem, but you must not call it Homer.’ On Pope’s Odyssey, its secret collaborators, and why a translation can be a masterpiece in its own right.
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White Nights: The Most Beautiful Lonely Story
Four nights in the Petersburg twilight and a love that was never quite possible. On White Nights, the tenderest and saddest thing Dostoevsky wrote.
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The Gambler: The Novel Dostoevsky Wrote to Pay a Debt
Dictated in 26 days to escape a ruinous contract, on the addiction that was destroying its author. On Dostoevsky’s The Gambler.
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Poor Folk: Dostoevsky’s First Cry
His first novel made him famous overnight. On Poor Folk, the epistolary story of two lonely people in a Petersburg slum, and the birth of Dostoevsky.
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Hopalong Cassidy Before Hollywood
The movie Hopalong was clean-cut and teetotal. The original was a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed cowhand with a limp. On the real Bar-20 saga before Hollywood.
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Andy Adams: The Cowboy Who Actually Was One
Most Western writers never sat a horse. Andy Adams rode the trails himself and wrote the West as a job, not a shoot-out. On the truest voice of the cattle drive.
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The Pickwick Papers: The Novel That Made Dickens Famous
At twenty-four, an unknown reporter became the most famous writer alive. On The Pickwick Papers, Sam Weller, and the sudden birth of Dickens.
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Sons and Lovers: Lawrence and the Mother’s Grip
The classic novel of the mother’s love that both saves and cripples. On Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, written from his own childhood while the wounds were open.
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Bleak House: Dickens’s Great Novel of the Fog
It opens with the most famous fog in English fiction — and the fog is a whole society choking on its institutions. On Dickens’s most ambitious novel.