George Eliot’s novels are often painful places to be. Her characters frequently find themselves embroiled in circumstances beyond their control or understanding, struggling to find their way forward in the face of incompatible desires or competing goods.
Read MoreFor several days in succession fragments of a defeated army had passed through the town. They were mere disorganized bands, not disciplined forces.
Read MoreAmber Carpenter’s Indian Buddhist Philosophy presents its reader with an engaging account of the philosophical development of Buddhist thought in India, from its origins in approximately the fifth century BCE to about the eighth century CE.
Read MoreThe lag between surface reading’s gestation in the late 2000s and its critical uptake/interrogation in the early 2010s roughly corresponds to the time between Kenneth W. Warren’s delivering the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard in 2007 and his publication of the book based on those talks in 2011.
Read MoreAt the end of the seventeenth century a new literary genre or subgenre emerged in England, one that might be characterized as the nocturnal picaresque.
Read MoreThey had obviously taken the pictures of the whale, and the group of people carrying it, out of curiosity. But still the images failed to produce any satisfactory explanation. Now we only knew how it had entered, but still not why.
Read MoreFor Tranströmer is ever conscious of the split between the fact of routine and a truth of the imagination.
Read MoreIn one of my albums of old family photographs there is a picture of my brother and I standing on either side of Babe Ruth’s locker in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Read MoreDid your insomnia begin then, I asked him as I looked down to make a mental note of the elapsed time on my phone’s voice recorder – 163 minutes – as we strolled through the sunlight in Mitte onto Alexanderstraße
Read MorePerhaps this is what finally draws me back to the Western. It is a fundamentally serious genre. It deals with serious questions, and it does so, at its best, with an admirable economy of style, wasting little time on frivolity.
Read MoreSo much for an academic #Marx21c. What about the avant-gardes?
Read MoreIn the UK, 2013 was the year a moderate but sustained recovery finally began. The chancellor announced that this showed his plan was working, and that his critics were wrong.
Read MoreIn one week I had seen plenty of misery in Greece’s train of misfortune. Apart from protest slogans covering public and private walls, the homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks, and the soup kitchens, it is the generalized distress that has struck me.
Read MoreThe peculiar circumstances surrounding the publication of Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel constitute a case study in how even the biggest literary news stories are, in the wider scheme of things, small potatoes.
Read MoreIn a quiet office tucked away in Mayfair – over a long table so white I am hesitant to even place my fingers on it – Adair Turner is speaking to me about the nature of money.
Read Moreby Mel Goldberg The wind sways branches The road appears smooth Shadows alter a trail Boulders disrupt a stream I am too far away From my father’s grave To place this stone On his marker When I say one thing I mean another Mel Goldberg has been shortlisted for the 2015 Berfrois Poetry Prize.…
Read MoreA taste for rural scenes, in the present state of society, appears to be very often an artificial sentiment, rather inspired by poetry and romances, than a real perception of the beauties of nature. But, as it is reckoned a proof of refined taste to praise the calm pleasures which the country affords, the theme is never exhausted.
Read MoreSo with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood.
Read MoreRacism persists, especially in its more invisible and subtle forms. Terms including modern racism, symbolic racism, and aversive racism, emphasize forms of racial discrimination that are “more likely than ever to be disguised and covert,” in contrast to the more popularly recognized “old-fashioned” varieties of racism characterized by “overt racial hatred” and public displays of bigotry.
Read MoreHe’s a man, but he could be something else: a catastrophe, a roar, the wind. He sits in an armchair covered by a blanket. He wears a denim shirt, a beige sweater with several holes, corduroy pants. Behind him, a sliding door separates the living room from a balcony with two chairs. Beyond, a lot covered in plants and shrubs. Then the Pacific Ocean, waves biting at rocks like black hearts.
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