Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse tells the story about the titular character and his spiritual quest. Siddhartha is the son of a Brahmin, a Hindu priest, who realizes he wasn’t suited for the traditional path towards enlightenment. Along with his friend, Govinda, he joins the Samanas, a sect of ascetics, but even the life of...
Though I have a lot of good things to say about Blonde, I must confess it’s the novel that broke me. I read it as part of my ill-advised feature-writer series about Joyce Carol Oates. The feature-writer series was a short-lived program I started in 2019, where I would focus on one writer a...
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...
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 of her most famous poems, my progress soon derailed. Why? On an emotional level, it derailed because, though I...
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 choices at my local theater. Since the movies it’s been showing were movies I had decided to wait for...
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 genius. In organizing Ariel for publication, Hughes dropped twelve poems that Plath intended to include, and he replaced them with twelve...
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. My mother was born on a kitchen table in Athol, Idaho. Plath came to life in Boston, Massachusetts. Both...
