Latest posts
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Les Misérables: The Novel as an Act of Mercy
An ex-convict steals a bishop’s silver, is caught, and is forgiven — and from that single act of mercy Victor Hugo built the most generous novel of the nineteenth century.
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The Idiot: Dostoevsky’s Beautiful, Doomed Christ
Dostoevsky set himself the hardest task in fiction: to portray a truly good man. The result is one of his strangest and most heartbreaking novels — the story of a holy innocent loosed into a world that cannot survive him.
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Vanity Fair: The Novel Without a Hero
Thackeray called it “a novel without a hero,” and gave it instead the most magnificent anti-heroine in English fiction: Becky Sharp, who lies, climbs, and charms her way through a society that deserves her.
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War and Peace: The Novel That Holds the Whole of Life
People say War and Peace the way they say Everest — a thing measured by its size. The reputation hides the strangest fact about Tolstoy’s novel: it is one of the easiest of the great books to read.
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Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Weight of a Single Failure
A young man stands at the rail of a foundering ship in the dark. The vessel, an overloaded pilgrim steamer called the Patna, has struck something in the…
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The Golden Age of Children’s Classics: Alice, Oz, and the Books That Shaped Childhood
Sometime in the half-century between 1865 and 1911, childhood acquired a literature of its own, and the books written in those years have never been…
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Nolan’s Odyssey: An Honest, Long Review
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a real achievement — and a flawed one. An honest, long review: the pre-release outrage from people who hadn’t seen it, Anne Hathaway’s Penelope, the missing sunlight, the ‘Nobody’ scene Nolan cut, and the argument about the cast nobody makes calmly.
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The Decadents: Wilde, Dorian Gray, and Art for Art’s Sake
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” So Wilde announced in the preface to The…
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The Picaresque: Don Quixote, Gargantua, and the Comic Road
Before the novel was respectable, it was a vagabond. The form we now teach in universities and bind in cloth began its life in the gutter, in the company…
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Sea Stories: Melville, Conrad, and the Ocean as Fate
There is a kind of book that cannot happen on land. Not because the action requires water, but because the sea does something to character that a drawing…