by Ted Gioia

1.

First, don’t be afraid of the big bad Wake. Reading it is an
adventure, not a punishment. Consider it a rite of passage,
or as the literary equivalent of one of those extreme sports
they put …

How Henry James Invented Modern
Fiction with The Ambassadors (1903)

by Ted Gioia

At first blush Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1903) must seem
an unlikely candidate for the honor of Great American Novel.  For
a start, none of this story …

(An Essay in 26 Fragments)

                          by Ted Gioia

1

Mainstream literary fiction is falling to pieces.   

2

This may not be a bad thing.

3

The fragmented novel has been a mainstay of the literary
world for the last …

by Ted Gioia

The spheres of art and the imagination have painfully little
in common with business, trade and finance, and some
might go so far as to see these two vocations, the artist
and the manager, as diametrically opposed …

by Ted Gioia

How do you assess an author’s lasting impact?

Forget the blurbs, they are less than worthless. Even the glowing reviews
will soon be forgotten. Awards are no better indicator—half of the writers
honored with the Nobel Prize …

A Look Back at Sartre’s Nausea

Essay by Ted Gioia

Philosophers can be incisive storytellers—and have been since the earliest
days of the discipline. The most memorable passages in Plato’s Republic
deal with his allegory of the cave, which cleverly …