Latest posts
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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…
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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…