Latest posts
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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…
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Paradise Lost: Milton’s Satan and the Problem of Evil
“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.” It is the most quoted line John Milton ever wrote, and very nearly everyone who quotes it has the speaker…