By Bergotte Valerie Solanas is the writer this series was not supposed to include. She is not canonical. She is not comfortable. She wrote one major text, the SCUM Manifesto, which calls for the elimination of men, and she shot Andy Warhol in 1968, and she died alone in a welfare hotel in San FranciscoContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Valerie Solanas”
Category Archives: Literature
William Faulkner: Memory, Myth, and the Architecture of the American South
William Faulkner remains one of the most challenging and rewarding figures in American literature. Born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897, he spent nearly his entire life in the South, fashioning from it a fictional universe — Yoknapatawpha County — that became one of the great imaginative geographies of world literature. Like Joyce with DublinContinue reading “William Faulkner: Memory, Myth, and the Architecture of the American South”
Brideshead Revisited: Memory, Grace, and the Politics of Nostalgia
To approach Brideshead Revisited is to enter a layered architecture: a country house that is also a theology, a love story that is also a meditation on class, and a memoir that is also an argument about memory. Evelyn Waugh published the novel in 1945, in the wreckage of war and rationing; he later prunedContinue reading “Brideshead Revisited: Memory, Grace, and the Politics of Nostalgia”
Martha Gellhorn: The War Correspondent Who Refused to Be a Footnote
Martha Gellhorn never liked being remembered as Ernest Hemingway’s wife. She was, as she often reminded anyone who asked, “a writer before I met him, and a writer after I left him.” Indeed, over the course of nearly six decades, Gellhorn became one of the 20th century’s most formidable war correspondents—a woman who witnessed theContinue reading “Martha Gellhorn: The War Correspondent Who Refused to Be a Footnote”
Sylvia Plath: The Mirror and the Flame
Sylvia Plath occupies a singular place in modern literature: a poet whose voice is at once crystalline and combustible, whose life and death have become inseparable from her art, and whose influence continues to radiate across generations. To speak of Plath is to confront both her genius and her mythology. She is remembered as aContinue reading “Sylvia Plath: The Mirror and the Flame”
Robert Graves’s Villa in Mallorca: A Poet’s Sanctuary in Deià
On the steep, pine-scented slopes of Mallorca’s Tramuntana mountains lies the village of Deià—a place that has long drawn artists, musicians, and wanderers in search of inspiration. Among its most storied residents was Robert Graves, the English poet, novelist, and classicist, who made a house here in 1929 and turned it into one of theContinue reading “Robert Graves’s Villa in Mallorca: A Poet’s Sanctuary in Deià”
Agatha Christie: The Queen of Crime and the Enduring Spell of Hercule Poirot
Agatha Christie remains the most widely read novelist in history, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Known as the “Queen of Crime,” she transformed detective fiction from pulp entertainment into a global art form. Her tightly constructed plots, eccentric sleuths, and elegant prose made murder an intellectual puzzle as much as a narrative shock.Continue reading “Agatha Christie: The Queen of Crime and the Enduring Spell of Hercule Poirot”
Stefan Zweig: The Last Cosmopolitan
Stefan Zweig remains one of the most haunting figures of twentieth-century literature. A chronicler of human passions, a biographer of geniuses, a novelist of psychological insight, and ultimately an exile undone by history, his life reads like a parable of modernity itself: brilliance shadowed by catastrophe. Vienna and the Belle Époque Born in Vienna inContinue reading “Stefan Zweig: The Last Cosmopolitan”
To See Someone Truly: On Great Are the Myths
There is a moment near the beginning of this novel that contains, in miniature, everything the novel will spend three hundred pages unfolding. The boy has come to visit Birdie’s house for the first time. He is thirteen, working-class, new to Memphis, not entirely sure why he has been invited. The house is enormous —Continue reading “To See Someone Truly: On Great Are the Myths”
The Second Novel: On the Chapter Titles of Great Are the Myths
Great Are the Myths has sixty-six chapters. It also has a prologue, a section heading, a commencement, a coda, and an author’s note. But before any of that — before the first sentence, before Birdie’s voice begins — there is a title. And then another. And then sixty-four more. Read in sequence, the chapter titlesContinue reading “The Second Novel: On the Chapter Titles of Great Are the Myths”
My World of Interiors 