news, views & reviews
Posted in Action/Adventure, Children, Fantasy, Young Adult on Dec 7th, 2007
By J.K. Rowling
reviewed by John Murphy
I was a pimply teenager when Star Wars: the Phantom Menace came out in the summer of 1999. Two of my siblings and I skipped class on a Monday morning to attend the first showing. After the movie was over, as we walked out of the theater into the mid-afternoon […]
Posted in Literary Criticism on Dec 4th, 2007
The Guardian recently ran an essay on the works of Joseph Conrad to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth. The author, Giles Foden, embraces Conrad as one of the first and greatest modernists of the English language. Though that point is indisputable, Foden’s obsession with Conrad’s “moral relativism” as central to his enduring legacy […]
Posted in Classics, Literary Criticism on Dec 2nd, 2007
Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer-prize winning columnist for the Washington Post, has recently authored a book called Classics for Pleasure, about the abiding joy of reading “duh classics,” as Tony Curtis would say. Included in Dirda’s book is an essay on G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, which G.K. fans should be pleased-as-punch about. In […]