In 1974, ten years after Flannery O’Connor died, Alice Walker visited O’Connor’s farm in Georgia. It was located minutes from the sharecropper shack where Walker had once lived. ­Walker had read O’Connor voraciously but put her stories away when she discovered other writers, whom she…

Sayers rises above the average mystery author in both style and profundity. Dorothy Sayers was a successful mystery novelist when she published Gaudy Night (1935), yet this novel is revered as the most literary of her fiction titles. She began publishing mysteries for the money. A struggling,…

To read or not to read literary criticism, that is the question for the twenty-first century reader who prefers to process 42 characters instead of 42 minutes of reading a substantial argument. I draw the either-or dilemma from Hamlet’s famous speech on suicide, whether or…