Modern people, despite being drawn to medieval aesthetics and artificats, cannot seem to bear to examine what those artifacts are modeled on: the intelligible order glimpsed by the eye of faith. Continue Reading »
The moral shelf life of pop cultural artifacts seems much shorter than ever before, and the criteria by which they might be judged far less predictable. Continue Reading »
Intentionally or not, The Ickabog may be the most serious literary indictment of the mass response to the COVID-19 epidemic published to date. Continue Reading »
We need a new kind of literary culture in which criticism and analysis can finally thrive: one that lives with and loves books for their “hidden gifts.” Continue Reading »
Sometimes a book is in the canon of children’s literature just because the writing is so good. Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, for instance, stands as the perfection of its kind: a prose of greeny gold, of summer recollected in autumn’s light. Rudyard Kipling, too, has the perfect sort . . . . Continue Reading »
By now most readers in this country are aware of what has come to be called the Harry Potter phenomenon. It’s hard to be unaware. Any bookstore you might care to enter is strewn with giant stacks of the Harry Potter books—three of them now that Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban has . . . . Continue Reading »
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