Writers, like pop stars, are often one-hit wonders. Assignation to this category seemed to be the fate of Donna Tartt, whose intellectual thriller The Secret History was published in 1992.…
What would literary heroines of old have done without an inheritance? Would Jane Eyre have met Rochester again on her own terms? Would Isabel Archer have been the prey of…
As everyone knows, a proper Knight of the Round table cannot tolerate an affront to his honor. Due to some clause in the chivalric code, Arthur and his boys seem…
Julia Glass admires Shakespeare, Pope, and George Eliot, but she says her desire to write like them is an “unrequited craving.” Right she is. Three Junes more closely resembles a…
In one of his most famous allegories, Plato writes in his Republic: “Imagine human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling… They’ve been there since childhood, fixed in the same…
It is no surprise then that Rushdie’s intellectual inquiries have so often centered around the notions of borders and boundaries; transgressions and journeys; the crossing of frontiers, and the struggle…
An exhibit at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg is called Dvoe, or “Twosome.” It pairs paintings and sculptures to suggest dualities in Russian art: East vs. West, peasant vs.…
With a collection of essays, you can always tackle one piece in a hurry—say before bed or waiting for a train—without leaving a vaguely remembered thought to be picked up…
George Orwell has suffered the saddest fate for a political writer: he has been rendered uncontroversial. Animal Farm and 1984 are assigned reading for junior high school students around the…
In a lighthearted reference, Christopher Woodward begins his book with the image of Charlton Heston finding the ruins of the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes—an image prefigured…
Peter Ibbetson