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Lovely, I’m not sure how else to describe it. Proustian without the interminable scenes of awful people blathering on. Woolf (at least here, I haven’t read anything else by her) is gentle and empathetic. Each viewpoint character, as strange or dam

Breaking with my normal habit for no particular reason, I reviewed Measure For Measure on Goodreads instead of here. I reproduce the review here for posterity: This book provides something I’ve always wanted but never

As he walks through London, Peter Walsh finds himself “standing under Gordon’s statue, Gordon whom as a boy he had worshipped; Gordon standing lonely with one leg raised and his arms crossed,—poor Gordon, he thought.” As an American who doe

I don’t have a whole lot to say. It didn’t leave me with much impression. It was competent; great prose as you’d expect from Jane Austen, but less substantial in the character building. The villain is obvious practically from the moment he appears

“Ah! He has got a partner; I wish he had asked you,” said Mrs. Allen; and after a short silence, she added, “he is a very agreeable young man.” “Indeed he is, Mrs. Allen,” said Mrs. Thorpe, smiling complacently; “I must say it,

Bear in mind, I’m only 5 chapters in, but it seems like Austen is breaking with her usual style of telling the story mostly through the viewpoint of her main character. She has a number of authorial asides already, most notably her defense of the

For example, today I learned from an untitled 1937 Robert Frost poem that Abercrombie and Fitch did not get their start as an edgy early 1990s mall-fashion store.

Am I reading my own inner Distributist into Frost here, or is there an implicit criticism of the owner of the woods? (I’m calling the viewpoint character Robert Frost, yes, persona, etc., but I’ve got to call him something) “Whose wo

One of my goofier literary theories is my half-belief that Taylor Swift is riffing on Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi in Tis The Damn Season. There are a few reasons I think this, but what first put it in my head was the finality o

The Extinction of Irena Rey wears a lot of masks: it’s part political thriller, part locked room murder mystery, part psychological horror (are the pagan Polish gods real, or is she having a mental breakdown?). But most of all, it’s a Bor