Latest posts
-
Demons: Dostoevsky’s Prophecy of the Terrorist
A cell of idealists talk of freeing humanity and end by murdering one of their own. On Demons, Dostoevsky’s prophetic novel of the terrorist mind.
-
Balzac’s Father Goriot: The Gateway to the Human Comedy
The doorway into Balzac’s Human Comedy — money as the engine of everything, Paris as a jungle, and a young man learning the city’s one lesson. On Father Goriot.
-
King Lear: Nothing Will Come of Nothing
Shakespeare’s bleakest play — a universe with no justice, where wisdom comes only at the cost of everything. On King Lear.
-
Othello: The Tragedy of a Whisper
Its catastrophe is tiny: a man is talked out of trusting the one who loves him. On Othello, Iago’s motiveless malignity, and how jealousy works as poison.
-
Macbeth: The Shortest, Darkest Tragedy
Shakespeare’s shortest and fastest tragedy — evil narrated from the inside by a man who never stops seeing how far he has fallen. On Macbeth.
-
The Early Christie: How the Queen of Crime Began
It began with a wartime bet from her sister. On Agatha Christie’s first great decade, the invention of Poirot, and the craftsmanship the snobs miss.
-
As I Lay Dying: Fifteen Voices, One Coffin
A family hauls their mother’s coffin across a flooded county — told by fifteen narrators, none of whom sees the whole. On Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and the daring of its form.
-
The Jungle Books: Kipling’s Law of the Wild
Forget the cartoon. On Kipling’s Jungle Books — the Law, the loneliness of Mowgli, and fifteen fables far stranger and harder than any adaptation.
-
The Complete Poe: Every Tale in One Volume
Not a writer of scares but the inventor of the detective story, early science fiction, and the modern short story. On reading all seventy of Poe’s tales in one volume.
-
The Maltese Falcon: The Stuff That Noir Is Made Of
The 1941 film is almost word-for-word the book, because the book was already perfect. On The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade, and the moral weather of noir.