Interviews

The Wrath and the Wanderer: Joel Christensen on Homer, 3,000 Years Later
The Wrath and the Wanderer: Joel Christensen on Homer, 3,000 Years Later
According to the ancient historian Plutarch, Alexander the Great never traveled without a copy of Homer's Iliad. Said to have been annotated by his tutor, Aristotle, the volume reportedly rested... Read more...
Susan Wolfson
The Novel Behind the Monster: Susan Wolfson on Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”
In June 1816, during a summer so cold and rain-soaked that it would later be called “the year without a summer,” a group of young writers found themselves confined indoors... Read more...
Richard Nemesvari
The Many Versions of Hardy: Richard Nemesvari on Editing a Career
When Tess of the d‘Urbervilles was first serialized in a British magazine in 1891, readers encountered a story quietly stripped of its rougher edges. A scene in which Angel Clare... Read more...
Vicki Mahaffey
The Joy in Joyce: Vicki Mahaffey on Reading James Joyce Differently
On February 2, 1922, James Joyce‘s 40th birthday, a young American bookseller named Sylvia Beach placed the first copies of Ulysses into his hands at her Paris shop, Shakespeare and... Read more...
Alan Strauss-Schom
When the Historian Becomes the Story: A Conversation with Alan Strauss-Schom
Alan Strauss-Schom has devoted himself to resurrecting the lives of others. His biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III, and the great dramas of the Napoleonic era established him as one... Read more...
Francesca Lessa
The Pact That Terrorized a Continent: Francesca Lessa on the Hidden Machinery of Operation Condor
On the morning of September 21, 1976, Orlando Letelier climbed into his car on Sheridan Circle in Washington, D.C., and began his commute to work. He was a former Chilean... Read more...
Katherine Bucknell
Coming Into Focus: Katherine Bucknell on the Many Lives of Christopher Isherwood
In January 1939, a young English writer boarded a ship in Southampton bound for New York alongside his friend W. H. Auden, and never really went home again. Christopher Isherwood... Read more...
Richard Polt
The Question Remains: Richard Polt on Thinking, Technology, and the Shadow of Martin Heidegger
Why is there something rather than nothing? It is the oldest question in philosophy, and one that most thinkers eventually set aside and move on from. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) never... Read more...
Aubrey Malone
Between Norma and Marilyn: Aubrey Malone Opens the Final Curtain on Marilyn Monroe
In the early 1950s, a photographer named Eve Arnold arrived on a film set to shoot a young actress between takes and found her sitting alone in a corner, reading.... Read more...
Bread, Bombs, and Memory: Abdalhadi Alijla’s Reckoning with Gaza
Bread, Bombs, and Memory: Abdalhadi Alijla’s Reckoning with Gaza
There is a moment in Fearful in Gaza when Abdalhadi Alijla describes his mother reading stories by candlelight during a power outage, her voice steady, her children gathered close while the... Read more...
James L. W. West III
The Beautiful and Damned (Text): How James L. W. West III is Preserving Fitzgerald’s Legacy
In the spring of 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald took his family to the French Riviera, rented a villa, and wrote The Great Gatsby in a sustained burst of concentration that he... Read more...
Matthew Shipe
Reading Roth, Recklessly: Matthew Shipe on Sex, Politics, and the Literary Legacy of Philip Roth
In 1969, Philip Roth's publisher received a letter from a rabbi in New Jersey demanding that Portnoy's Complaint be withdrawn from sale. It was one of thousands. The novel, narrated by... Read more...