Latest posts
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The Phantom of the Opera: Gothic Romance Beneath the Stage
Gaston Leroux opens his novel with a straight face and an outrageous claim: the Phantom of the Opera existed. Not as a legend the ballet-girls invented,…
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Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf: The Wolf Inside
“For the mad only.” The placard over the door of Hesse’s Magic Theater is the truest line in Der Steppenwolf, because the book it belongs to is a…
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The House of Mirth: Wharton’s Tragedy of Money
Lily Bart is twenty-nine years old, beautiful past the point of debate, and worth nothing. That is the situation Edith Wharton sets out in the opening…
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Epic Poetry After Homer: Virgil, Dante, and Milton
Homer had no model. Whoever the Greeks meant by that name inherited a tradition of oral song but no single predecessor against whom to measure himself, no…
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Jack London: The Call of the Wild and the Law of the North
Buck does not understand the snow. That is the first thing London tells us about the dog at the center of The Call of the Wild, and it is the whole novel…
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The Wizard of Oz: America’s Own Fairy Tale
In the introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written in 1900, L. Frank Baum made a quiet declaration of independence. The old fairy tales, he wrote,…
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A Tale of Two Cities: Revolution, Sacrifice, and Dickens’s Darkest Triumph
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Everyone knows the opening, and almost no one finishes the sentence, which runs on for another two…
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Heart of Darkness: Conrad and the Horror of Empire
There is a moment, two-thirds of the way up the river, when Marlow finds a book. It is an old volume on seamanship, annotated in the margins in what he…
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Dashiell Hammett and the Invention of Hard-Boiled Crime
Before Dashiell Hammett, the detective was a brain in a chair. Poe’s Dupin reasoned out crimes from his armchair; Conan Doyle’s Holmes deduced a man’s…
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H.P. Lovecraft and the Birth of Cosmic Horror
Most horror flatters us. It assumes that human beings matter enough to be worth tormenting — that there is a vengeful ghost who cares about us, a…