Complex and confusing, filled with words you don’t know and people you don’t understand, life is even more difficult to navigate than Ulysses. But luckily, we have Ulysses to help… Read more »

It is easy to forget that Ancient Greek tragedies and epics composed by writers such as Homer and Euripides were originally set to music. Consideration of this important aspect of… Read more »

How do you date a text from roughly 8 B.C.E.? You track it like a geneticist. “Languages behave just extraordinarily like genes,” says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist at the… Read more »

The Toronto International Film Festival wrapped up this weekend, and thanks to NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, I heard about a couple literary film adaptations that really seem worth… Read more »

This weekend, Vulture released a trailer for director Andrea Arnold’s film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s classic novel of tragic love and revenge. The film premiered last year at the… Read more »

The Book of Khalid, the first Arab-American novel, stands as the foundational text of Arab-American literature, despite having been out of print in the United States since its first publication… Read more »

Laughter in the Dark was the first of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels to be published in the United States, in 1938, by the then venerable Bobbs-Merrill of Indianapolis. The beautiful jacket… Read more »

Raise your hand if you’ve been to prison. Nobody? Good, we’re all law-abiding citizens here, as are, I propose, most readers interested in books about spending time behind bars. After… Read more »

Ernest Hemingway’s second novel, A Farewell to Arms, has just come out in a new edition from Scribner, and for the first time, it includes the various alternate endings to the… Read more »

Recently, Shelf Awareness pointed us to this wonderful survey of a six-year-old’s judgments on classic books by their covers. The blogger-mom at Strollerderby asked her daughter to tell her what… Read more »