Latest posts
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The Blue Castle: The Novel About Finally Starting to Live
A repressed twenty-nine-year-old spinster is told she has a year to live — and decides, at last, to actually live it. L.M. Montgomery’s only adult novel is a joyful, liberating surprise.
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Agnes Grey: The Truest Novel Ever Written About Being a Governess
The quietest Brontë wrote the most honest of their novels — a clear, unsparing account of the loneliness and humiliation of the governess, drawn straight from her own life.
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The Professor: Charlotte Brontë’s First, Overlooked Novel
Rejected by publishers in her lifetime and printed only after her death, Charlotte Brontë’s first novel is the quiet seed of everything she would become.
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King Solomon’s Mines: The Adventure That Invented a Genre
Three Englishmen cross a desert and a mountain range in search of a legendary treasure — and H. Rider Haggard invents the lost-world adventure that runs straight to Indiana Jones.
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This Side of Paradise: The Novel That Made Fitzgerald Famous
At twenty-three, Fitzgerald published a messy, dazzling first novel about a beautiful, aimless young man — and woke up famous, the voice of a generation that wanted to live fast.
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The Arabian Nights: The Stories That Saved a Life
A woman tells stories to postpone her own execution, night after night, for a thousand and one nights. From that frame comes the greatest treasury of storytelling in world literature.
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Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen’s Joke on the Gothic Novel
Austen’s first-written novel is her funniest — a loving parody of the gothic thrillers her heroine reads, and a sly defense of the very novels snobs sneered at.
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The Mysterious Island: Verne’s Robinson Crusoe of Science
Five castaways land on an empty island with nothing — and rebuild civilization from first principles. Verne’s great survival epic is a hymn to human ingenuity, with one enormous secret waiting at its heart.
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Hard Times: Dickens Against the Machine
Dickens’s shortest novel is his angriest: a fierce assault on an age that reduced human beings to facts, figures, and fuel for the factory.
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Anna Karenina: Tolstoy and the Two Kinds of Love
“Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” Tolstoy put the verdict at the front of the book — then spent nine hundred pages making sure we cannot pass it.