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M. R. James' A View from a Hill: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis

Many of James’ best stories are nightmarish wish fulfilments of their author’s own personal fantasies. We see this in “A Warning to the Curious,” where the narrator bewails (“alas!...

A Must-Read Book By One of Our Sharpest Contemporary Voices

Cultural commentary can make for absorbing and infinitely entertaining reading, especially when it's being written by this must-read critic.

How to complete my project despite criticism of genre

I've been getting a lot of flak about my favourite style, but I'd like to finish the poem. No guessing where I should stop    Exposing genre anathema       Too much vernacular     ...

Leo Tolstoy Calls Shakespeare an ‘Insignificant, Inartistic Writer.’ Then George Orwell Fires Back

After his radical conversion to Christian anarchism, Leo Tolstoy adopted a deeply contrarian attitude. The vehemence of his attacks on the class and traditions that produced him we...

How to Keep Criticism from Sinking Your Soul: Walt Whitman and the Discipline of Creative Confidence

"I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood."

Washington Irving's The Legend of the Arabian Astrologer: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis

The entirety of The Alhambra is given over to dreamy vistas, wistful romances, solemn reflections, and earnest moralizing. Written while Irving was living in Granada under the shad...

Silence: a brief literary history

LITERATURE expresses complex and nuanced ideas — the powerful feelings that define us as human beings and the detailed observations that illuminate all aspects of our lives. It doe...

The Literary Agent’s Invisible Hand: Laura B. McGrath on Middlemen

“Good taste means nothing if you can’t sell a book.”

Washington Irving's The Adventure of My Aunt: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis

One of the classic tropes of Gothic fiction is the haunted portrait: the dusty painting of a grim figure in old-fashioned garb, whose eyes gleam in candlelight and seem to follow—o...

The Political Truths of Literary Friendship

The private letters of famed literary critic Harold Bloom offer an ethical guide for politics.

Heaven’s Elegist

Alfred Tennyson's poetry addressed the central anxiety of his day: how to live in a world where scientific discoveries were slowly replacing religious faith.

Washington Irving's The Legend of Don Munio Sancho de Hinojosa: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis

In yet another episode from The Alhambra, Irving returns to several of his favorite themes: fate, love, honor, memory, and the terrible human cost of violence. Like so many of the...

Marianne Moore on the There Elements of Persuasive Writing

Several years ago, rummaging through the archives of the Academy of American Poets, I came upon a box labeled “Ballots 1950” — the record of the secret vote by the chancellors the...

Book review: Letters to a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Letters to a Young Poet is not a typical book with a story, characters, or plot. Instead, it is a collection of ten letters written by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to a young aspiri...

Washington Irving's Guests from Gibbet Island: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis

One of Washington Irving’s most deliciously Gothic tales—perhaps rivaled only by The Adventure of the German Student—“Guests from Gibbet Island” would have felt perfectly at home i...

Analysis of similes in literature

For the Pudding, Russell Samora, with design and illustration by Shelly Tan, analyzed…Tags: fiction, Pudding, Russell Samora, simile, words

Literaturkritik von Denis Scheck: Die Kunst des Verrisses

In der Debatte über Denis Scheck und seine gefürchtete Mülltonne steht einiges auf dem Spiel. Vor allem: das Recht darauf, die Sau rauszulassen. mehr...

The Aesthete from Archer

The ironies that affix themselves to the life and literature of Larry McMurtry are best exemplified by the title of his autobiographical meditation on storytelling, Walter Benjamin...

Literary Passion: Dispatches from the front line

Good Friday HE IS dead. He has reached the end of his life. And they — the fragments of his following — have reached the end of his story. They have followed him as far as they c...

Poetry: I Too, Dislike It

I was a latecomer to poetry, curling my nose at it in that confounding and rather embarrassing way we have of discounting what we don’t understand, dismissing as useless what we do...

TALKING CLASSICS

Someone who taught ancient Greek and Roman culture at Cambridge for 50 years isn’t going to say there is no point, but Beard is quick to assure readers, in the breezy tone familiar...

Elizabeth Strout is back with a new novel: Read our review in this week's Literary Fiction along with Uprising by Tahmim...

Claire Allfree reviews the best new Literary Fiction out now.

Literary Tribute to mark 100th Birthday of Journalist & Critic Afzal Sherwani