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 to say something is perfect? I consider some things perfect. Michelangelo’s David is a perfect statue. I remember standing...
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 her an income, but it’s insufficient for her to maintain her current lifestyle. A second man, Edgar Swift, intends...
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 Haunting of Hill House, scares me on a physical or emotional level, Henry James’ novel scares me on a...
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 I didn’t own a television and didn’t subscribe to the newspaper, I sheltered myself away from world events. But...
