Essay Nabokov: When playfulness is serious March 22, 2021 A rather common response to Nabokov has entailed complaints that he is altogether too cerebral or calculating a writer. Read More
Essay Madame d鈥橝ulnoy, the mysterious fairy鈥憈ale queen March 17, 2021 For those readers who do not believe that fairies are real, they should think twice, for the extraordinary Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Comtesse d鈥橝ulnoy (1650鈥�1705) did not only invent the term fairy tale (conte de fees) and create tales about fairies, she was a fearless fairy herself. Read More
Podcast The life of Geoffrey Chaucer March 02, 2021 Uncovering important new information about Chaucer鈥檚 travels, private life, and the circulation of his writings, Marion Turner reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer鈥檚 adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination. Read More
Video The multilingual pleasures of English February 08, 2021 At a moment of resurgent nationalism in the English-speaking world, 脡migr茅s invites native Anglophone readers to consider how much we owe the French language and why so many of us remain ambivalent about the migrants in our midst. Read More
Essay How Each Line Appears | some loose leaves January 04, 2021 Rain in Plural is the much-anticipated fourth collection of poetry by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who has been praised by The Rumpus as 鈥渁 master of musicality and enlightening allusions.鈥� In the wholly original world of these poems, Sze-Lorrain addresses both private narratives and the overexposed discourse of the polis, using silence and montage, lyric and antilyric, to envision what she calls 鈥渃reating between liberties.鈥� Read More
Podcast Sexuality, gender, and race in the Middle Ages December 18, 2020 While the term 鈥渋ntersectionality鈥� was coined in 1989, the existence of marginalized identities extends back over millennia.聽Byzantine Intersectionality聽reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval thought and visual culture around matters of sexual and reproductive consent, bullying and slut-shaming, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, trans and nonbinary gender identities, and the depiction of racialized minorities. Read More
Essay The mountain memories that fuelled Tolkien鈥檚 epic tales December 14, 2020 鈥業t鈥檚 a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door.鈥� Bilbo Baggins is thinking of adventure, of course, not pandemics. 鈥榊ou step into the Road, and if you don鈥檛 keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.鈥� Yet The Lord of the Rings is a lesson in how far you can travel without leaving home. Read More
Essay Bob Dylan鈥檚 rowdy ways and American voice September 25, 2020 One of the great ironies surrounding Bob Dylan鈥檚 2016 reception of the Nobel Prize for Literature is that, at the time of the prize, the great songwriter had just released a pair of recordings that featured no compositions of his own. Read More
Interview Roy Foster | On Seamus Heaney September 10, 2020 The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. Read More
Podcast Listen in: Finding humanity through fairy tales July 14, 2020 Ever since I began a collaboration with 快色直播 in 2008 to found聽the Oddly Modern Fairy Tales series, almost all the books we have published have been聽somewhat political but not didactic. Read More
Reading List Be Enchanted July 01, 2020 The imaginative and often dangerous world of fairy tales spins common human experience in a way that feels strangely vital. Read More
Interview Erica McAlpine on The Poet鈥檚 Mistake June 17, 2020 Keats mixed up Cortez and Balboa. Heaney misremembered the name of one of Wordsworth鈥檚 lakes. Poetry鈥攅ven by the greats鈥攊s rife with mistakes. Read More
Podcast Listen in: Lives of Houses May 05, 2020 What can a house tell us about the person who lives there? Do we shape the buildings we live in, or are we formed by the places we call home? And why are we especially fascinated by the houses of the famous and often long-dead? Read More
Interview By Design | Oddly Modern Fairy Tales April 24, 2020 Fairy tales exert a keen influence on the collective imagination. By turns entertaining and frightening, didactic and illuminating, they are the stuff of dreams, but also of reality. Read More
Essay Reading Callimachus through comics April 17, 2020 Comics and illustration鈥攕iblings or cousins, related in so many ways鈥攁re deeply hybrid art forms. Read More
