Articles & Essays

I always thought the Shire was better than the Ring of Power. To love The Lord of the Rings, one must desire the simple life of ordinary things, of anonymity, of local community, of what can still sometimes be found in rural, small-town America. When Frodo…

How (and how not) to be certain of yourself. When I was a little girl, my favourite book was Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. As much as I disliked cats, the Cheshire Cat defied all expectations with his wisdom. Alice is lost in the woods,…

When I was rereading Homer’s The Odyssey, I noticed a curious fault in the hero—Odysseus falls asleep at the most inopportune times. At the start of his adventures, he dozes off when the ships are in sight of Ithaca, the pilgrim’s destination. Hoping that by overexerting…

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…

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…