This post originally appeared in Cleveland Review of Books Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Firesis a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the internationally famous Little House books. In it, Fraser tells a story of sweeping historical significance, at
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in July 2019. Traditional fairytales, despite their reputation as stories for young children, are replete with horror and gore. The fairytale genre is one in which evil queens dance themselves to death
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in June 2019. Originally published in 2002, The Days of Abandonment sits uncomfortably in its cultural moment. Elena Ferrante’s examination of the spiraling decline of an abandoned wife resists the hopefulness of the girl-power-era,
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in May 2019. Philosophies for achieving genuine happiness and a good life are never intended to create dystopias. Nevertheless, many writers enjoy taking these ideas to their extremes, creating in their fictions
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in April 2019. In The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes examines the relationship between art and power, or, more specifically, between individual creativity and a controlling state. The novella is a fictionalized biography
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in January 2018. The Italian intellectual and novelist Umberto Eco died on February 19, 2016, just four short months before the surprise result of the British referendum on the European Union. During
This review was originally published on OperaWire Cecilia Bartoli’s latest album, “Antonio Vivaldi” (2018), comes almost twenty years after her historic recording, “The Vivaldi Album,” which was released in 1999 to wide critical acclaim and incredible popular success. The 1999
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in March 2019. The “sexism of genius” has been well studied and widely reported. Male professors are more than three times as likely to be described as “geniuses” by their students than female professors,
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in February 2019. George Eliot had a great interest in music. Her partner, George Henry Lewes, was friends with the pianist and composer Franz Liszt and, through this connection, Eliot met many
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in January 2019. What makes a novel “difficult,” and why does that label matter? When we think of traditionally “difficult” writers—James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon, for example—the answer to the first part