Latest posts
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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…
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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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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…