Latest posts
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E. M. Forster and A Room with a View: The Edwardian Heart
A young Englishwoman stands at her pension window in Florence and complains that her room looks onto a courtyard instead of the Arno. A stranger across…
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Arsène Lupin: The Gentleman Thief Who Mocked Sherlock Holmes
At the end of his great duel with the English detective, Arsène Lupin loses. The case is decided against him; the master of method has, on points,…
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Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter: Guilt and the Puritan Shadow
The most subversive thing about The Scarlet Letter is that its heroine never repents. Hester Prynne wears the embroidered “A” that her Puritan neighbors…
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George Eliot and Middlemarch: The Greatest English Novel?
Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” and the backhanded compliment still stings because it is…
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B. M. Bower: The Woman Who Wrote the West Behind a Man’s Initials
Near the close of Chip, of the Flying U — the 1904 novel that launched B. M. Bower’s career and a series that would feed her for thirty years — a cowboy…
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Homer: The Complete Works — Why Read All of Homer in One Volume
There is a moment in the twenty-second book of the Iliad, just after Achilles has run Hector down beneath the walls of Troy, when the narrative pauses to…
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Huckleberry Finn and the American Voice
Why is Huckleberry Finn important to American literature?
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Shirley and the Forgotten Side of Charlotte Brontë
What is Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley about?
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Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Map of the Afterlife
How do I read Dante’s Divine Comedy?
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Hard-Boiled vs Cozy: The Two Souls of Crime Fiction
What is the difference between hard-boiled and cozy mysteries?