Latest posts
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Political Violence in America: A Long, Recurring Shadow
On the morning of July 11, 1804, the sitting Vice President of the United States rowed across the Hudson to a ledge in Weehawken, New Jersey, and shot the…
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Manufacturing an Enemy: How Propaganda Dehumanizes
Propaganda did not kill six million people. Police killed them, and soldiers, and bureaucrats who stamped the forms, and the railwaymen who drove the…
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Machiavelli’s The Prince, Five Centuries On
In 1513, a recently tortured and unemployed Florentine bureaucrat sat down in exile on his small farm at Sant’Andrea and wrote a short book he hoped would…
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The Invention of Jane Austen: How a Spinster Became a Global Brand
When Jane Austen died at Winchester in July 1817, at the age of forty-one, she was an unmarried woman of small means whose novels had been published…
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The Invention of Poe: How a Genius Was Slandered Into Myth
On October 9, 1849, two days after Edgar Allan Poe died in a Baltimore hospital under circumstances no one has ever fully explained, the New-York Daily…
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Stream of Consciousness: How the Death of the All-Knowing Narrator Remade the Novel
Stream of consciousness wasn’t a technique — it was what the novel did when the all-knowing narrator died. A deep essay on modernism, Woolf, and Joyce.
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The Real Jane Austen: Life Behind the Novels
What was Jane Austen’s life actually like?
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Tolstoy vs Dostoevsky: Two Ways of Writing a Soul
What is the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky?
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Dumas and His Ghostwriter: The Auguste Maquet Question
Did Alexandre Dumas write his own novels?
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The Life of Charlotte Brontë: Gaskell’s Classic Biography
What was Charlotte Brontë’s life like?