Flannery O’Connor insisted there would be no biographies about her because “lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.” A Southern writer confined by lupus to a farm outside of Milledgeville, Georgia, O’Connor taught people through her fiction how…

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…

This spring I read Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie solely because of the blurb on the back of the book said: “Determined to instill in independence, passion, and ambition, Miss Brodie advises her girls, ‘Safety does not come first. Goodness, Truth, and Beauty come…

Odds are you have spent a lot of time lately wishing you had the map in front of you. Until this point, there were signs ahead of each turn, clear indicators of what would be next. And now, it all appears a vast field, or…