Much is not known about William Shakespeare, as Thomas Marc Parrott acknowledges in his agile, erudite and very helpful 1934 book William Shakespeare: A Handbook. But the man’s plays and [...]
William Shakespeare’s plays and poetry have been the touchstone of English and world literature for more than four centuries ago. But the man behind them, known in his time as [...]
As a title, An Angel in Sodom is evocative and a bit ambiguous. The subtitle of Jim Elledge’s book is much more direct: Henry Gerber and the Birth of the [...]
Near the end of Stewart Sterling’s 1946 novel Where There’s Smoke, Ben Pedley rips the dress off a sultry songstress named Leila Lownes and then throws his body on her. [...]
Terry Pratchett is writing about a particular kind of madness that can affect human beings, those of heightened sensitivities, such as artists. He’s embodied this mental aberration in a bodiless, [...]
Two images from The Missing of the Somme, the 1994 book by Geoff Dyer about memory and the Great War, now called World War I: Young men, lined up at [...]
In The Penelopiad, her 2005 revisualization of The Odyssey from the point of view of Penelope, Margaret Atwood uses the queen of Ithaca’s twelve maids as a Greek chorus to [...]
In his 2004 Discworld novel A Hat Full of Sky, Terry Pratchett suggests that people “weren’t stupid just because they lived a long time ago.” He’s describing a fictional version [...]
In her new book of poetry Woman without Shame, Sandra Cisneros looks aging in the face and laughs. She laughs at the frenetic lusts and couplings of youth — at [...]
In the epilogue of her astute, significant and multi-dimensional Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer focuses on the work of sculptor Teodoro Ramos Blanco. She writes that, during the course [...]
