The literature of horror is mostly a mish-mash of monsters, murderers
and maniacs. The terror is external, lurking behind a dark corner, in a
cemetery, or inside a gloomy castle. The essence of this terror is the
encounter with the …
Where do we go to discover the real James Joyce?
The first published life of James Joyce came from the pen of the
author himself, and if readers had any doubts that his debut novel
was autobiographical, the title itself …
by Ted Gioia
Here are your survival tools for Finnegans Wake. For your benefit,I’ve prioritized these, with the essential items at the top, and the optionalitems lower down on the list. Students of this work also need to knowabout several …
Essay by Ted Gioia
Let me cut to the chase—something Javier Marías rarely does during the course of this 1300-page
novel in three volumes. Here’s the bottom line: This is one of the best novels I’ve read in the last…
Truman Capote, in his last literary project, decided to stitch together
a novel out of bits of gossip. He never completed the work, which
he called Answered Prayers, although some chapters were
published in Esquire and later collected into …
James Joyce’s father once commented on his son: “If that fellow
was dropped in the middle of the Sahara, he’d sit, be God, and
make a map of it.”
In this rumination on the Joycean mindset,
John Joyce wasn’t talking …
Despite what you may have read elsewhere, most of the
experimental techniques of modernist and postmodernist
fiction were developed long before the 20th century. We
encounter arch meta-narratives in Cervantes and a self-
consciously absurdist fragmentation of texts in Rabelais. …
It perhaps seems absurd, but the best way of grasping the significance of War and Peace might
be by considering all the things that Tolstoy left out. The absurdity here stems from the obvious
fact that this massive novel is …
Leo Tolstoy wrote three supersized novels. Two of them rank among the best known classics of
world literature, the third one is rarely read and mostly forgotten. Yet when Resurrection was
published in 1899, it created a sensation and outsold …
Essay by Ted Gioia
Leo Tolstoy “read a lot of English family novels,” his son Sergey later recalled, “and sometimes
joked about them.” The great Russian writer claimed that “these novels always end up with him
putting his arm round …
