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Flannery O’Connor said the task of a fiction writer is to deepen the mystery.Raymond Chandler at twenty-three, writing in surprisingly Chestertonian mode in his essay “Realism and Fairyland,” wrote that “the spirit of an age is more essentially mirrored in its fairy-tales than in the most painstaking chronicle of a contemporary diarist.” It’s fascinating to […]

We know what we like — but not why. The part of us that comes up with rationalizations for what we like is not the same part of us that does the liking. The phrase “I don’t know a lot about art, but I know what I like” might translate roughly into “There is little […]

Cynthia Ozick’s story “Dictation” creates a fictional relationship between two real women — Theodora Bosanquet, the secretary of Henry James, and Lilian Hallowes, the secretary of Joseph Conrad.By the story’s end, Bosanquet has entered into a lesbian relationship with Virginia Woolf, although since Woolf is identified only as Leslie Stephen’s daughter “Ginnie,” inattentive readers may […]

Robert B. Ray, in his book How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies, provides this 1868 quote from Théophile Gautier —“Faced with this paradox in painting, one may give the impression – even if one does not admit the charge – of being frightened lest one be dismissed as a […]

From Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa —“’Well,’ I said, ‘we have had, in America, skillful writers. Poe is a skillful writer. It is skillful, marvelously constructed, and it is dead.’”I read this the other day, and had difficulty figuring out what Hemingway was getting at, with respect to Poe. The “dead” part, that is, not […]

In On Being Certain, Robert Burton writes, “Since beginning this book, I have increasingly found myself asking a single question of any idea – be it the latest scientific advances, a pop psychology book, or personal opinions (mine as well as those of others): Is the idea consistent with how the mind works?”One book Burton […]

This is a multi-generational saga set in a society where the institution of the family has broken down.Janine is the daughter of a Third Republic official. She functions in the book as an anti-matriarch, an archetypal Bad Mother.Her two sons have different fathers. The boys’ relationship with each other is tenuous and casual; they seem […]

From Charles Darwin’s autobiography —“I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a […]

Lera Boroditsky cites experimental evidence that the language you speak shapes how you think — including the finding that the grammatical gender your language assigns to a noun influences your thoughts about the object in question. Boroditsky describes a beautifully-designed experiment: “when asked to describe a ‘key’ — a word that is masculine in German […]