Latest posts
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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…
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The Invention of Julius Caesar: How a Man Became a Myth
On the Ides of March, 44 BC, a balding fifty-five-year-old Roman politician was stabbed twenty-three times by a group of senators at the foot of a statue…
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Dante’s Inferno: A Traveler’s Guide to Hell
“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.” So begins the most famous…
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Conan the Cimmerian: Robert E. Howard and the Birth of Sword and Sorcery
In June 1936, in Cross Plains, Texas, a thirty-year-old man learned that his mother would not wake from her final coma. He walked out to his car, took a…
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The House of the Seven Gables: Hawthorne’s Haunted America
“The wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable…
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Elizabeth Gaskell: The Novelist of the Industrial Age
When Charles Dickens wanted a writer who could make the cotton mills of the north feel like a moral emergency rather than a statistical abstraction, he…