This post originally appeared in Cleveland Review of Books Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires is 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,
In her recent book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Kate Manne offers a framework for understanding how misogyny operates in contemporary Western societies, and a vocabulary (‘himpathy’, ‘herasure’) for discussing some of its more insidious aspects. Drawing on recent
1) Nightwood by Djuna Barnes Published in 1936, Nightwood is a haze of alcohol, glamour, sex, and love in all its desperate, unconventional, and painful forms. It tells the story of the mesmerising Robin Vote, who leaves a trail of cigarette ends and
An edited version of this review appeared in issue 9.3 of ImageTexT: read it here To what extent can our favourite comic book superheroes be viewed as sovereigns in their own realms? And how does the role of superhero complicate or otherwise
A parentless gypsy of fifteen or sixteen, Esmeralda captures the interest of four very different admirers. There is the philosopher Pierre Gringoire, the playboy Captain Phoebus, the repressed archdeacon Claude Frollo, and the eponymous hunchback, Quasimodo. These admirers, though individually very different, fall
Charlotte Salomon was a German-born Jewish artist of significant achievement and greater promise but aged just 26, and pregnant with her first child, she died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz. The crowning achievement of Charlotte’s tragically short life, Leben?
Volume one of The History of England takes us from a geographical overview of prehistory through the tribal chieftain-monarchies of early England and the establishment of single ruling dynasties, up to the reign of the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII. The
The Daemon Knows is an exploration of what Bloom calls the “American sublime”: that class of literature that reaches beyond the human, in a way that is distinctly American. What is beyond the human falls, by Bloom’s estimation, into three
In this book, Robert Colls sets out to chart George Orwell’s changing attitudes towards “Englishness”, and the various positions he holds, and tries to hold, in relation to it. He achieves this through a mixture of biography, political history, and
Umberto Eco’s final novel is a fast-paced historical thriller centred on a newspaper that will never be published, and a conspiracy theory surrounding the death of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. At just under 200 pages, Numero Zero is the shortest