It is difficult to imagine the activity of reading in the post-industrial age without the presence of the novel. The novel as modern readers know it, despite its many forms and distinctive subgenres, remains a direct descendant of the... Read More

Technologically advanced humanity insists that people surround themselves with the appurtenances of civilization, but into this catalog by necessity creeps the fixtures of disaster, such as fire extinguishers, fallout shelters, airline... Read More

A small, rural town in north-central lower Michigan, Idlewild is barely a wide spot on U.S. Highway 10, with very little to separate it from the blur of other near-ghost towns on the upland of the Manistee National Forest: a shuttered... Read More

Arthur M. Schlesinger taught past presidents an important lesson: If you want escapees from your administration to write glowing memoirs or how-to books for aspiring politicians about you, make sure to get assassinated. If you live to... Read More

History can be enchanting. Too often it is relegated to forensic inquiry, where vast armies and larger-than-life characters engulf simple lives, at which point all present-day relevance can be lost. The genuine stuff of history, though,... Read More

Kurt Vonnegut once said that everything he had written could be neatly boiled down to a single sentence. After a broad confession like that, a person might respond: Why bother reading the rest of it? Not until the last fifth of the book... Read More

“We groped and stumbled along a deep ditch to the place appointed for us in that zone of human havoc. The World War had got our insignificant little unit in its mouth; we were there to be munched, maimed or liberated.” With this... Read More

In the canon of twentieth century art, the name of Aubrey Beardsley does not loom large, if at all, given his death in 1898. On this, the one-hundredth anniversary of the young Englishman’s too-early demise, there is something of a... Read More