Front Porch
Once I—with someone else (because you need someone else for such a thing)—once I transformed my front porch into...
Nationalism and the Limits of Inquiry
Perhaps George Orwell was right when he wrote in Notes on Nationalism (1945)—one imagines his eyelids lowered and his...
Pamela Weaponized
The final scene in Martin Crimp’s When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other: Twelve Variations on Samuel Richardson’s Pamela turns...
Brightly Starred
Some say that Mary Shelley chose her only surviving child’s wife for him—a woman like herself a young widow...
Boris Johnson is a Fictional Character
“Who does he think he is?” I heard a commuter grumble, as she stared, aghast, at yet another headline...
T. H. White’s Anecdotal Eighteenth Century
Like many a child of the 80s, I grew up reading T. H. White’s The Once and Future King...
Proposals, on Behalf of an Elective Global Canon
The canon in literature has typically been understood in two coordinated ways. The first is elective: What are the...
The Novel in Two Parts
In her influential 2008 essay, “Two Paths for the Novel,” Zadie Smith aimed to steer novels away from lyrical...
Leap
The word “leap” shows up repeatedly in sayings and clichés: leaps and bounds, leap of faith, leap for joy,...