Mark My Words: Profiles of Punctuation in Modern Literature by Lee Clark Mitchell. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Softcover, 166 pages, $15. Reviewed by Oliver Spivey Many literature professors have long expressed their embarrassment at simply professing literature. Not...
Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form by James Bailey. University of Edinburgh Press, 2021. Hardback, 224 pages, $100. Reviewed by Asher Gelzer-Govatos Reading critical approaches to a favorite author can be an exercise in futile...
Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages by Holly Ordway. Word on Fire Academic, 2021. Hardcover, 382 pages, $24. Reviewed by John Tuttle Holly Ordway’s engrossing volume Tolkien’s Modern Reading is significant in its own right, but it also marks...
Geographies of Flight: Phillis Wheatley to Octavia Butler by William Merrill Decker. Northwestern University Press, 2020. Paper, 294 pages, $43. Reviewed by J. L. Wall Aboard the Arbella—or maybe in Southampton before the colonists departed for the New World—John...
Schlump by Hans Herbert Grimm. NYRB Classics, 2016. Paperback, 288 pages, $16.95. Reviewed by Michael Shindler There are the great German books of the First World War that everyone knows: Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Ernst Jünger’s Storm of...
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!