Latest posts
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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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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…
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Grimm’s Fairy Tales: The Dark Originals
The stepsisters in the Grimms’ Cinderella do not merely fail to fit the slipper. They take a knife to themselves. The mother hands the first one a blade…
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Robinson Crusoe: The First English Novel and the Self-Made Man
In 1719 a sixty-year-old Londoner with a long career as a merchant, a spy, a pamphleteer, and a bankrupt published a book whose full title ran to a…
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Alice in Wonderland: The Logic of Nonsense
On a golden afternoon in July 1862, a shy Oxford mathematics don named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson took the three young daughters of the college dean rowing…
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The Birth of Science Fiction: From Frankenstein to Wells
Science fiction has no founding charter and no single birthday, but it has a remarkably tight gestation. In a span of roughly eighty years — from a rainy…