Interviews

JC Bernthal
The Mystery That Never Ends: J. C. Bernthal on Agatha Christie and the Architecture of Suspense
In December 1926, the British public found itself consumed by a mystery that had escaped the bounds of fiction. Agatha Christie, already an emerging force in crime literature, vanished from... Read more...
Et Tu, Zarzeczny? The Man Who Dares to Simplify Caesar
Et Tu, Zarzeczny? The Man Who Dares to Simplify Caesar
On the morning of March 15, 44 BC, a group of Roman senators arrived at the Theatre of Pompey with daggers hidden beneath their togas, convinced they were saving the... Read more...
Peter Schulman
Into the Unknown: Peter Schulman on Jules Verne, the Father of Tomorrow
Most readers encounter Jules Verne as children, boarding a hot-air balloon, descending into the center of the Earth, sailing twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea, or racing around the globe... Read more...
Yingjian Guo
The Good Earth, Revisited: Yingjian Guo on Pearl Buck’s Legacy in China
In Zhenjiang, in China’s Jiangsu province, a young Pearl Buck spent her childhood under the care of a local woman named Wang, who looked after her for eighteen years. Wang... Read more...
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...