Category: Essay

The first part of my title comes from, and refers to, W. H. Auden, who once said, “When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.” The...

A Transgressive History   Much of literary culture regards the Gothic genre as an archaic embarrassment—gloomy ruins and paranormal lovers that serious practitioners have learned to dismiss. Yet such dismissals neglect a...

If you’re eccentric, you’re all right.” This is how Humphrey Carpenter, biographer of W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound and Benjamin Britten, explained the British character to me as an expatriate South African. It was 1993, and we were...

  It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night—and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over. —F. Scott Fitzgerald   When...

As she contemplates her late husband’s hat, Fermina Daza—in Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera—muses on how it “resembled him more than his portraits” did. It’s a touching thought. Somehow, the things that...

The last time I wrote about James Baldwin, in the late 1990s, I concluded that his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was his best, and that his second, Giovanni’s Room, was sentimental, artificial, and populated by stock...

In the fifties in the Midwestern suburb where I grew up, the fathers mostly read thrillers if they read fiction at all. The mothers got their reading recommendations from the Reader’s Digest, the Book of the Month Club, and each...