In the latest horrible news, book bans are coming back into fashion—a Cold War relic, now de rigeur for any conservative activist (and/or presidential hopeful). The overwhelming majority of books singled out for cleansing are recently-published works that focus on LGBTQ themes or race. But a handful of classics still make the cut to be […]
I Am Elinor Dashwood
During the last class meeting of my Jane Austen seminar, the students and I took an internet quiz to find out which Austen character we most resembled. I teach at a Jesuit liberal arts college, so it came as little surprise that several of the hard-working, conscientious, and religious seniors matched with either Jane Bennet […]
On Never Letting the Novel Go
When I was in high school, I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. It was making a stir on the literary scene at the time, and I remember thinking it was a serious, grown-up novel for serious, grown-up people. While my friends were chewing through Twilight and Harry Potter for the eighteenth […]
Romancing the Stallion
Recently I had occasion to ask: did Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion (1941) set me up for life as a fan of early prose fiction? When I went back to Farley’s story, which I read and loved as a child, I was struck by how familiar it felt to my adult self, who studies and […]
Dear Mrs. Cleary
When Beverly Cleary died at age 104 in 2021, most tributes to this beloved writer focused on just one of her indelible creations: Ramona Quimby, a good-hearted but incorrigible and frequently irritating little sister. Ramona is central to a small fictional universe of kids on Klickitat Street in Portland, Oregon, where Cleary lived from age […]
I Capture Cassandra
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. I read this line from Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949) squirreled up on a twin bed in my grandmother’s nineteenth-century mountainside house. The one window is so tiny it allows only a smokey, persistent dusk. In a castle, it would be called a loophole. Hours […]
The Reader as a Work-in-Progress
My mother and father (directly and indirectly) introduced me to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. My father moved to Bombay from Calcutta (via Mussoorie) in the 1970s, when he was just shy of becoming a teenager, and he grew up in the city with the confidence and quickness of an urban resident; she led a […]
The Work of Remembering: An Interview with Devoney Looser
Devoney Looser’s acclaimed Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës came out in October 2022 from Bloomsbury Publishing. Recently, I caught up with her to discuss what’s changed following her subjects’ reintroduction into the literary world. Bethany Creed: You wrote a wonderful article for Literary Hub on […]
Our Flag Means Fop
David Jenkins has explained that the inspiration for his hit television show Our Flag Means Death, which has just concluded its second season, came partly from poring over the historical record of eighteenth-century pirates Stede Bonnet and Edward Teach, a.k.a. Blackbeard. Jenkins realized that the two had an intense but mysterious relationship. He filled in […]