Reading Archive
‘A Couple of Waterloos in Every State’
The US owns the road novel—for good reason. There’s Lolita, The Grapes of Wrath, and On the Road—to name just a few.
Exploring personal politics in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The sinister Jean Brodie continues to bewitch: decades after the publication of the novel that bears her name, the myth of her humanism persists; she has long been shorthand for a strain of idealism and independent thought that she never represented in the first place. The Prime of Miss
Download One of These Literary Podcasts Today
We live in the Golden Age of podcasts. They’ve been around for a while, but the medium has exploded in the past few years. Whatever your interest, there is a podcast for you, probably several. It should come as no surprise that for the literary-inclined, podcasts represent an embarrassment
On Fictional Sex in the ’90s
Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away--that is, in 1990s mid-Atlantic America, in which I was miserable in a very teenage way, being a teenager--I began to read Tom Robbins.
The Physics of Poetry or the Poetry of Physics
When I started my Google search with the words “physics and poetry” I did so with some reluctance, knowing that each time I clicked on a headline or hit the return key I was willfully handing over hours of time to the trailings of one of my recent curiosities.
Reading Erika Meitner and Katherine Anne Porter
Growing up in North Carolina, I was surrounded by languages half-understood. At synagogue, there was the Hebrew I read and chanted but couldn’t understand.
The “fall” of “The Hollow Men”
When I first started watching BBC's serial killer drama The Fall, I was excited to discover that the episode titles were all famous lines from Paradise Lost. But the title is also a reference to another, very different classic poem: “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot.
Short Stories Are Forgotten Grist for the Hollywood Mill
January means it’s award season for the movie industry. As the nominations and trophies are being passed out, it’s a good time to note how the history of Hollywood is inextricably linked to the history of literature.
Constructing Selves: Character in Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s “Accomplice”
I’ve written before about the magic I find, as a writer and reader, in the world of the school as a setting for fiction. Like most of my predilections when it comes to literature, gravitating toward this world isn’t really a conscious choice.
How Does a Korean Debate Capitalism vs. Communism?
Choi In-Hun’s novel The Square is a modern Korean classic that might be called a bildungsroman of ideology. Originally released in 1961, the Dalkey Archive Press translation by Kim Seong-Kon was released as part of the Archive’s Library of Korean Literature in 2014.