Literature

The Politics of Stephen King’s Fiction 6
- Literature, Featured
- July 31, 2024
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Stephen King, and I came to wonder about the horror writer’s political ideas. Several right-leaning essayists have already noticed a seeming disconnect between King’s politics and the spirit of his fiction. Tim Cavanaugh labels King a “lefty,” yet notes that his stories are full of “hard-headed pragmatism and
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Shakespeare’s Sisters 0
- Culture, History, Literature
- July 26, 2024
It’s almost a century since Virginia Woolf wrote “Shakespeare’s Sister” in which she presented the plight of an imaginary sister of Shakespeare who is thwarted because of her sex from emulating her brother’s literary success. Frustrated by the lack of literary opportunity and finding herself pregnant, she does the only sensible thing that a woman
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Summer Reading for G.K. Chesterton 0
- Literature
- July 2, 2024
This is the time of year when people are asked to compile their summer reading lists. The idea of these lists, as far as I can see, is to suggest books that are relaxing, not taxing; slim volumes, not monumental tomes; lighter fare that can be read recreationally, for pure pleasure, perhaps on the beach
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1984 in 2024: Orwell Was Right 1
- Culture, Literature
- June 12, 2024
Americans still read George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” 75 years after it was first published on June 8, 1949. At the time, the year 1984 was far in the future; now it’s 40 years in the past. Yet our present feels more than ever like Orwell’s dystopia. The novel is set on Airstrip One, a totalitarian
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Something Rotten in Denmark: Israel, ‘Hamlet,’ and the Current Crisis 13
- Culture, Featured, International, Literature
- June 4, 2024
As someone with a background in foreign affairs and English literature, I realized recently that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Hamlet of territorial disputes. While Hamlet is often considered the exemplar of Shakespeare’s corpus, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often regarded as the exemplar of land disputes. Like Hamlet, the conflict has garnered much attention over the
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A Century Ago G.K. Chesterton Had an Accidentally Accurate Vision of an Islamic Britain 0
- Literature, History, Religion
- May 22, 2024
29 May sees 150 years since the birth of G.K. Chesterton, the once-famed English writer and Catholic apologist – now a deeply unfashionable figure. Perhaps the single book which sums up best why Chesterton is not much read on university syllabuses today is his 1914 novel The Flying Inn, also celebrating 110 years in print in 2024.
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