Ishmael’s Real Name Was Jonah

Ishmael’s Real Name Was Jonah

The Interpretive Key that Allows Us to See Melville’s Work as a Unified Whole By Will Hoyt Like any other card-carrying American I have long believed that Melville wrote only one great work. Moby-Dick is—unquestionably if improbably—the one American novel against...
A Virus and a Fall of Rome

A Virus and a Fall of Rome

Scarpia by Piers Paul Read. Bloomsbury, 2016. Hardcover, 364 pages, $27. Reviewed by Trevor C. Merrill You could enjoy this novel about a young Sicilian rising through the ranks of Roman society in the 1790s without knowing anything about Puccini’s Tosca. It’s a...
The Power Has Flowed Away

The Power Has Flowed Away

Serotonin: A Novelby Michel Houellebecq. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Hardcover, 320 pages, $27. Reviewed by Zak Slayback “Did we yield to the illusion of individual freedom, of an open life, of infinite possibilities? It’s possible,” Michel Houellebecq’s...
Accountancy and Authority

Accountancy and Authority

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. Back Bay Books, 2012. Paperback, 597 pages, $18. Reviewed by Eve Tushnet At a certain point you realize that David Foster Wallace is as much a horror writer as Stephen King, and the monsters under his bed are twins: absorption...