Articles & Essays

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…

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…

You can have your body cremated and your ashes preserved in a golf bag. Etsy will personalize it with any final words of your choosing. We are at the point where a “Golfatorium,” to borrow the poet Thomas Lynch’s phrase, “seems, fetched only as far…

You can have your body cremated and your ashes preserved in a golf bag. Etsy will personalize it with any final words of your choosing. We are at the point where a “Golfatorium,” to borrow the poet Thomas Lynch’s phrase, “seems, fetched only as far…