Book Review: Pine by Francine Toon.
[The following contains spoilers.] Pine is a debut novel by Francine Toon (who is otherwise the poet Francine Elena) and …
Tag Archives: Literary criticism
Book Review: How To Survive Everything by Ewan Morrison.
[The following contains major spoilers.] Ewan Morrison’s latest novel, How To Survive Everything, begins on the road to the Scottish …
Book Review: Freedom!, An Anthology of Poems, Short Stories and Essays.
Freedom! is a treasury of helpful wisdom from thirty-six authors who are all “questioning Covid restrictions and lockdowns.” The preface …
Book Review: L’Île Mystérieuse by Jules Verne.
[The following contains spoilers.] [All of the English quotations in the following are taken from the 1876 translation by Stephen …
Short Story Review: “The Tortoise” by W.F. Harvey.
“The Tortoise” is one of the many thoughtful gifts within William Fryer Harvey’s first collection of short fiction, Midnight House …
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Tall Tale.
As the USA rolled westwards, the tall tale, a species of folk mischief, had emerged as the acutest cultural expression …
What is meant by the House in Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi?
[The following contains spoilers.] Any dream is a sequence of baffling and disquieting events, with all of them colluding in …
Podcast Review: The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
[The following contains spoilers.] The first thing to say about the BBC Radio 4 audiodrama “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is …
Aristocrats in Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris.
[The following is left over from my series on Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris. It should be read as …
Short Story Review: “Midnight House” and “Across the Moors.”
Midnight House and Other Tales (1910) is William Fryer Harvey’s debut volume of short stories. He must have written juvenilia, …
On the Motif of Hell in Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream.
[The following contains spoilers.] Has Thomas Hudson, the hero of Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously-published novel Islands in the Stream (1970), been …
Surveillance in Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris.
Eugène Sue’s crime novel, The Mysteries of Paris, was originally serialised in the Journal des Débats between 1842 and 1843. …
Libraries in the Era of COVID-19.
I have been trying to use the coronavirus lockdown to write some more ambitious literary criticism than appears customarily on …
On Autobiography in Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream.
[The following contains spoilers.] Ernest Hemingway had started writing the text that would become Islands in the Stream in 1946. …
Short Story Review: “The City of the Demons” by Doctor William Maginn.
In the assessment of the literary historian Wendell V. Harris, Doctor William Maginn is “perhaps the first nineteenth-century English writer …
Tychy 