Latest posts
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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 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…
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Machado de Assis: The Greatest Writer You Haven’t Read
Imagine a novelist who, in the 1880s, in a country most of his future readers could not find on a map, sat down and wrote a book narrated by a dead man,…
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Gargantua and Pantagruel: Rabelais and the Comedy of Excess
The word survives even where the books do not. We call a joke, a feast, a belly laugh “Rabelaisian,” and most people who use the adjective have never read…
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Rafael Sabatini and the Art of the Swashbuckler
“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” It is one of the great opening sentences in popular fiction, and it tells you…
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Madame Bovary: Flaubert and the Birth of Realism
In 1857 the French state put a novel on trial for offending public morality, and lost. The novel was Madame Bovary, the author was Gustave Flaubert, and…
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Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf: The Wolf Inside
“For the mad only.” The placard over the door of Hesse’s Magic Theater is the truest line in Der Steppenwolf, because the book it belongs to is a…
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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…
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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…