Interviews

The Widow Who Wrote the Widow: Nicole Lobdell on the Making of Mary Shelley’s Myth
The Widow Who Wrote the Widow: Nicole Lobdell on the Making of Mary Shelley’s Myth
When Mary Shelley died in 1851, she left behind a life that had already become myth in the making: the daughter of two radical philosophers, the teenage lover of a... Read more...
David Womersley
The Book They Tried to Silence: David Womersley on “Gulliver’s Travels” at 300
When Gulliver’s Travels was first published in October 1726, readers never saw the whole of what Jonathan Swift had written. One entire episode, an account of the floating island of... Read more...
Joseph Maddrey
From Revolutionary to Traditionalist: Joseph Maddrey on the Making of T. S. Eliot
In 1927, T. S. Eliot was secretly baptized into the Church of England and shortly afterward took British citizenship, formally completing a transformation that had been building for years. The... Read more...
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...