Latest posts
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…