Monstrous Things Dostoevsky, Alice Munro, and the nature of fiction—what does our inability to forgive do to our ability to confess? Allan Stratton 1 Sep 2024 · 11 min read
The Problem with Utopias The history of utopian fiction proves that we can’t even imagine a better world. Ewan Morrison 23 May 2024 · 15 min read
Desire and Ambition Today, most of John Braine’s work is out of print and forgotten. But he was an underrated writer, unafraid to confront the complexities of masculine sexuality with terse precision, self-deprecation, and emotional candour. Brad Strotten 13 Apr 2024 · 11 min read
Against Agency Attending to Shakespeare on his own terms may allow us to reclaim the erotic warmth that is latent in our human condition. Marilyn Simon 4 Apr 2024 · 8 min read
Beginning in Gladness, Ending in Madness 1900–1950 was a golden age of literary eccentricity. Stephen Akey 21 Feb 2024 · 14 min read
A Dense Thicket of Contending Visions In his latest novel, Tom Piazza imagines the finest meeting of American minds never to have happened. Matt Hanson 7 Jan 2024 · 6 min read
The Genocidal Imagination Philosophies of human cruelty, from Sade to October 7th. Pascal Bruckner 12 Dec 2023 · 21 min read
Robots, Rats and Hoverchairs: Three Dystopian AI Fantasies Human beings need meaning, and a life in which all one’s needs were met by external agents would fail to provide it. Stewart Slater 5 Dec 2023 · 9 min read
‘Augie March’ Turns 70 An Interview with Saul Bellow’s biographer Zachary Leader. Riley Moore 22 Sep 2023 · 12 min read
Our Lost Classical Learning The Western canon was not an unchanging set of texts, but an ongoing conversation that lasted thousands of years—enabling each generation to build on the intellectual heritage of the past. Brian Kaller 5 Sep 2023 · 7 min read
Milan Kundera: The Nobel Prize for Literature Winner We Never Had Few writers in our time were more committed to the novel or had more idealism about the heights the form could scale. Robin Ashenden 11 Jul 2023 · 12 min read
Chaucer’s Bawdy Broad More than six centuries after The Canterbury Tales first appeared, the Wife of Bath still has lessons to teach about love, sex, marriage, and—yes—feminism Charlotte Allen 20 Jun 2023 · 24 min read
Kazuo Ishiguro and the Uncanny Cascade We live in a transitional period, when the possibility of being duped by incomprehensible intelligences—and thereby duping ourselves—has grown exponentially. Anthony Eagan 7 Apr 2023 · 17 min read
The Real Reasons Why the English Department Died Most professors would rather watch it die than reform. Adam Ellwanger 5 Apr 2023 · 9 min read
Game, Set, Match Routinely reviled by contemporary critics as a celebration of misogyny, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ is among Shakespeare’s most misunderstood plays. Marilyn Simon 24 Mar 2023 · 12 min read
