Dune by Frank Herbert
Is Dune the perfect novel? Of course, perfection is what every piece of art—be it a painting, a sculpture, a poem, a song, a film, or a novel—strives to be. But what does it mean […]
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Up at the Villa by W. Somerset Maugham
Deciding her future, Mary Panton spends the summer in a villa outside Florence, Italy. She’s in a contest between four men. One man, her husband, whom she deeply loved, has died. A gambler, he left […]
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Of all the ghost stories I’ve read in my life, The Turn of the Screw is the one that seems most enigmatic, and therefore, it’s arguably the scariest. If the typical ghost story, for example Shirley Jackson’s The […]
The Rhythm Section by Mark Burnell
The world will long remember the dramatic events from August to December 1991, when the Soviet Union—the great antagonists to Western Democracies—collapsed under its own weight. I was living in Denver at the time. Since […]
Coffee Sunday: The Invisible Man; Ad Astra
September has not been the month I wanted it to be. My feature writer this month was Sylvia Plath. Though it began well with a post about her biography and a second post about two […]
Coffee Sunday: ItChapter Two, The Time Machine, Penny Dreadful
Last Sunday, I went to see It Chapter Two. This was my first movie outing in a month. I’m sure there have been some excellent movies released this summer, but I’ve been lukewarm about the […]
Plath: “Daddy” and “Medusa
In 1965, two years after Sylvia Plath’s death, Ted Hughes published Ariel. This was her second collection of poetry—her first was The Colossus (1960)—but it’s the collection that elevated her reputation and established her as a literary […]
Feature Writer: Sylvia Plath
It is, no doubt, an irrational comparison, founded on loose if not unstable grounds, but I wish to compare Sylvia Plath to my mother. Both women were born in October 1932, only nine days apart. […]
Coffee Labor Day
In honor of Labor Day, I’m having a Coffee Labor Day this week, instead of a Coffee Sunday. I finished reading Friday by Robert A. Heinlein. You might recall that it’s the novel I struggled […]
Poe: Other Works and Closing Thoughts
Though he lived only forty years, Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most prolific writers of his times. The most often reported number of short stories is sixty-nine, the number provided by the Edgar […]