Everyone is talking about Jane Austen and thats the problem, according to the author. The greater the “Jane” sensation, the less we know about the real Jane Austen. Auerbach wants to stage an intervention in the popular perception of... Read More

Given the earthquake of interest in the finale of HBOs Sex and the City—to say nothing of the sales of books like Bridget Joness Diary and The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right—it is no wonder that... Read More

In the tradition of poets who could make poetry pay—Byron, McKuen, Collins—William Cullen Bryant earned his place by having once been offered the princely sum of $1,000 in antebellum currency for any occasional verse he might... Read More

Most readers will easily recall the nineteenth-century American poets they studied in college because they were so few and indeed so memorable: Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson largely make up the very short list. Published in the Modern... Read More

The injunction not to judge a book by its cover perhaps became a truism because the tendency to judge books by their covers—by their bindings, sizes, editions, illustrations, colors, paper, and point of sale—was indeed a habit of... Read More

While writers since Hesiod have employed insect imagery to make their metaphors crawl, no writer in the entomological tradition has as much “street cred” as Franz Kafka, whose hero Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis awakens to find... Read More

The idea of a pastoral golden age is as old as the oldest Western literature. The literature of the American heartland, the Midwest, while lacking the distinguished inheritance of New England, the bohemian glamour of the West Coast, or... Read More