Latest posts
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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.
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Demons: Dostoevsky’s Prophecy of the Terrorist
A cell of idealists talk of freeing humanity and end by murdering one of their own. On Demons, Dostoevsky’s prophetic novel of the terrorist mind.
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Balzac’s Father Goriot: The Gateway to the Human Comedy
The doorway into Balzac’s Human Comedy — money as the engine of everything, Paris as a jungle, and a young man learning the city’s one lesson. On Father Goriot.
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King Lear: Nothing Will Come of Nothing
Shakespeare’s bleakest play — a universe with no justice, where wisdom comes only at the cost of everything. On King Lear.
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Othello: The Tragedy of a Whisper
Its catastrophe is tiny: a man is talked out of trusting the one who loves him. On Othello, Iago’s motiveless malignity, and how jealousy works as poison.