The doctor’s words were incisive. “Jim… are you afraid of blood?” Dr. Livesey’s question is as prophetic as the gallows tattooed with spirit on Billy Bones’ arm. Readers of Treasure Island must, with Jim, prepare themselves for blood. Blood runs in glorious, gory rivers over the pages of this story, leaping from veins that pulse [...]
Tinkering in your cellar to build a time machine, as many of our readers claim to do, you’ll eventually require an operator’s manual. Much frustration can be avoided by reading a clever short story that is in many ways opposite to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, often as fun and infinitely [...]
In one of the best comic book stories of the last several generations, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Batman confronts Superman. Years into a dystopian future in which the United States has become more or less imperialist, fundamentalist, and oppressive, the rather conservative and patriotic Superman has rather unthinkingly joined forces with America [...]
It was a crisp fall evening when I met the storyteller for the first and only time. He was old, but probably not as old as he looked. Preoccupied with the few hairs he had left growing out from above his ears, he pushed the thin weeds back over his dome each time the wind [...]
In the recent trilogy of Swedish movies beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a rather unpleasant fantasy plays out for the viewer. A young, misfit girl (Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth Salander) is sexually abused, and, as the films drive towards their conclusion, revenges herself upon her immediate tormentors, and then ultimately upon the more [...]
A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is what Chesterton called the ‘good bad book’: that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have [...]
At the beginning of this calendar year, I was near campus on my usual daily 4-mile constitutional, earbuds in ears, my mind a million miles away. “Hi Brad, what are you listening to?” a rather famous visiting scholar asked me, seemingly from out of nowhere. Hoping to move to another topic very quickly, I responded dismissively, “Just [...]
John: A Novel, by Niall Williams Irish writer Niall Williams has written a novel that bridges the literary gap between time and the timeless. His latest work, John: A Novel, is a stunning revelation that “God is both ‘enclosed’ within the mystical soul, and he is the ‘enclosure’ that the mystic enters spiritually.” “The question came [...]
In my recently released co-edited volume, A Political Companion to Saul Bellow, the contributors explore the politics and political thought of one of the seminal fiction writers of America. Exploring Saul Bellow’s politics and his thought on race, religion, gender, multiculturalism, as well as other aspects of modernity that pushed him into the conservative camp, [...]
March 1, 2012, marked the 175th anniversary of William Dean Howells’s birth. In 1912 400 eminent writers, journalists, editors, social reformers, university presidents, and public men, including William Howard Taft, who had altered his schedule to attend, crowded Sherry’s restaurant in New York City to celebrate Howells’s 75th birthday. From England, Thomas Hardy and Henry [...]
Mark Twain, that teller of tall tales from the American frontier, has an almost mythical status in American literature and culture. The white suit, the wild hair, and the homespun humor have combined to add to his obvious literary skills a mystique that has spawned heroic portrayals in biographical one-man shows and works of fiction [...]
My name’s Friday. Good Friday. But it’s just a nickname. On the force we’re all good. That’s our job. (Music: DUM-de-dum-dum!) Angela’s my partner. But don’t let her looks fool you. This blonde’s the toughest officer on the beat. She fills out her civvies like a teenager’s dream, but don’t get any ideas. She left [...]
The Purloined Boy, by Mortimus Clay Several books into the Harry Potter series, Joseph Bottum wrote that J. K. Rowling’s genius was her ability to mush together elements in themselves of little worth: “A writer who puts one cliché into a book manages to produce pulp fiction. A writer who uses a dozen can produce [...]
The last thing he expected was a ghost. It was irritatingly illogical, but even months later he could think of no better explanation. Pedro dumped his textbooks in his locker and took the back way. It was faster. On a verdant soccer pitch past the university, Girona FC practiced for next Saturday’s grudge match against [...]