Christmas by the Book: Literature to Make Your Heart Grow Three Sizes
By Amanda Festa Some of my favorite memories of childhood are of the holiday season. Sparkling twinkle lights decorating houses, turning their ordinary facades into…
Category: Books
Loving Poetry with Robert Pinsky’s Singing School
By Caitlin O’Hara On love, on grief, on every human thing, Time sprinkles Lethe’s water with his wing. -Walter Savage Landor, “On Love, on Grief”…
Looking back: Wharton, Fitzgerald, and Ourselves
By Caitlin O’Hara Think of favorite endings of books that really resonate: Levin and his revelation towards goodness at the end of Anna Karenina. Molly Bloom’s return…
“Fates and Furies”: Two Takes on a Marriage, One Impressive Novel
Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies is an unusual accomplishment, not only because it is that rare ambitious novel that largely lives up to its ambition,…
The High Mountains of Portugal: A Thoughtful but Underwhelming Study of Grief
by Mary Kate Costigan Never let it be said that Yann Martel doesn’t like wild animals. Fifteen years ago he published Life of Pi, a…
In “Alive, Alive Oh!”, Diana Athill Remembers a Remarkable Life
By Mary Kate Costigan At 97 years old, Diana Athill has a lot of story to tell. Biographical details alone will tell you that those…
“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” Gives an Unlikely Lesson in Adaptation, is Awesome While Doing So
by Mary Kate Costigan As a teenager, I once made a list of inaccuracies between Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and its movie…
The Buried Giant: Why the Fantastic Isn’t Always Important in Fantasy
by Mary Kate Costigan In his first novel in ten years, Booker Prize winning author Kazuo Ishiguro enters a realm he has never entered before:…
Christopher Buckley Satirizes Medieval Europe in ‘The Relic Master’
by Mary Kate Costigan “Dismas might have purchased the finger bone of the Apostle Thomas, but there was something not quite right about the man…
Room 101, for Teenage Girls: A conversation with Only Ever Yours Author Louise O’ Neill
by Jessica Monk an image flared in my mind’s eye. It was of a girl, she was 16, standing in front of a classroom in…