Latest posts
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The Invention of Jesus: From Galilean Preacher to God
Somewhere around the year 30 of the common era, an itinerant Jewish preacher from the Galilean hills was executed by the Roman authorities in Jerusalem,…
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Why Dante Put His Enemies in Hell: The Politics of the Comedy
We are taught to read the Divine Comedy as a spiritual epic — the soul’s journey from the dark wood through Hell and Purgatory to the vision of God.…
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John Carter of Mars: Burroughs’s Other Mythology
In 1911, a failed pencil-sharpener salesman in Chicago, deep in debt and convinced he could write garbage at least as well as the garbage filling the pulp…
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Machiavelli’s The Prince, Five Centuries On
In 1513, a recently tortured and unemployed Florentine bureaucrat sat down in exile on his small farm at Sant’Andrea and wrote a short book he hoped would…
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Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass: The Poem That Invented American Poetry
In the summer of 1855, a Brooklyn printer set type for a thin quarto of twelve untitled poems and put his own name nowhere on the title page. There was,…
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Elizabeth von Arnim and The Enchanted April: Wit, Comfort, Escape
There is a kind of book we reach for when we are tired in a way sleep does not fix, and The Enchanted April is one of the finest examples in English.…
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Max Brand: The Poet Who Mass-Produced the Mythic West
The man whose name was Max Brand did not exist, and the man who wrote under it wanted to be remembered for something else entirely. Frederick Schiller…
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Helen of Troy: The Face That Launched a Thousand Arguments
“The face that launched a thousand ships” — Marlowe’s line has worn so smooth that we forget how peculiar it is. A face. Not a woman with a will, a…
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The Eddas and the Sagas: Where to Start With Norse Mythology
Most people meet the Norse gods sideways — through a Marvel film, a video game, a heavy-metal album cover, a Tuesday (Tyr’s day) and a Wednesday (Woden’s)…
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Where to Start With Wilkie Collins
There is a particular pleasure in reading a writer who does not trust you to sit still. Wilkie Collins, the most ingenious and least respectable of the…