Reviews
The Fire and the Plain Wrapper: Wide Sargasso Sea and the Prequel Problem
Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) walks into Jane Eyre through the attic and reassigns the guilt; a rereading of the prequel as a hostile art form.
Reviews: Tested and Rated
Reviews written after finishing the book, quoting enough to let a reader argue back. Each verdict states the ambition, assesses the execution, and places the title beside the work it descends from. Fiction, nonfiction and reissues all covered. For readers who want criticism with a position.
Reviews written after finishing the book, quoting enough to let a reader argue back. Each verdict states the ambition, assesses the execution, and places the title beside the work it descends from. Fiction, nonfiction and reissues all covered. For readers who want criticism with a position.
Reviews
The Long March: Blood Meridian's Forty-Year Climb
Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985) was a public failure on release; a rereading traces its forty-year climb into the front rank of American novels — and warns against the reverence that climb produced.
Reviews
Winter Terms: Rereading The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) won the Hugo and Nebula while leaving its own genre baffled; a rereading finds its patience is now its rarest property.
Reviews
One Wednesday, Struck Twelve: Mrs Dalloway and the Single Day
Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) perfected the novel of one day three years after Ulysses; a rereading finds the form was not a debt to Joyce but a verdict on plot.
Reviews
The Slow Ascent: The Great Gatsby's Road Into the Canon
The Great Gatsby sold fewer than 25,000 copies in Fitzgerald's lifetime; a rereading traces how a wartime paperback program carried the 1925 novel into the American canon.
Reviews
The Better Original: One Hundred Years of Solitude in Translation
Gregory Rabassa's 1970 English version of One Hundred Years of Solitude became the book's second body — the author famously preferred it — and a rereading finds the praise deserved but misattributed.
Reviews
The Quiet Verdict: Rereading Invisible Man Seventy Years On
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) still argues with its country rather than decorating it; a rereading seventy years after its National Book Award finds the design intact and the blind spots instructive.