Second Glance: Real News
/At a time when the world of news is in unprecedented furore, David Halberstam’s classic book on the media deserves renewed attention and appreciation.
Read MoreSecond Glance: “Darkly Luminous”: D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love
/The working title of D. H. Lawrence's Women In Love was Dies Irae - Day of Wrath. But reading it will make you feel not despairing but vibrantly alive.
Read MoreSecond Glance: Fatal Beauty
/Nothing shakes up the literary establishment like women writers -- or women readers -- who won't stay quietly in their place.
Read MoreSecond Glance: For Eternity
/John Bunyan's book-length religious allegory Pilgrim's Progress strikes many of today's readers as hopelessly hokey and tone-deaf - but it still has abundant power to change lives, as one passionate reader attests.
Read MoreSecond Glance: Wretched Creatures
/John Ford's story of star-crossed lovers is bloodier than Shakespeare's and more heart-wrenching, too, for it's a tragedy of childhood, of innocence lost.
Read MoreSecond Glance: No Lesser Crime
/“The Moonstone will have its vengeance on you and yours!” Those fateful words propel us into one of the first and best of modern English detective novels -- still sensational after all these years.
Read MoreSecond Glance: The Privy Mark of Irony
/The Knight of the Burning Pestle began its theatrical run in1607—and concluded it almost immediately. But why? Colleen Shea explores the mysterious failure of this hilarious, satirical, meta-theatrical romp.
Read MoreSecond Glance: A Virgil or Two
/He may not have anything new to tell us today, but as Spencer Lenfield demonstrates, Gilbert Highet's friendly, engaging pedagogy is still rare enough to keep him relevant.
Read MoreSecond Glance: Jane Collier’s Burn Book
/Long before Hairpin and Jezebel, Jane Collier, under the influence of Jonathan Swift, was savagely satirizing women's ettiquette guides in her work An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting. Chris R. Morgan revisits the caustic classic.
Read MoreSecond Glance: Halberstam’s Vietnam and The Anxiety of Power
/McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, RFK, JFK, LBJ--these were the best and the brightest of David Halberstam's landmark study of American politics during the Vietnam War. The book is now 40 years old and its lessons are as vital as ever.
Read MoreSecond Glance: Seth Morgan and the Kamikaze Novel
/With its headspinning wordplay and lunatic cast of characters, Seth Morgan's 1990 novel Homeboy blazed like a comet into the literary pantheon. Steve Danziger revisits this grime crime classic.
Read MoreSecond Glance: The Quiet One
/Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is usually overshadowed by her sisters' masterpieces, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, but this gripping novel, a startling exposé of Victorian patriarchy, deserves a turn in the spotlight.
Read MoreSecond Glance: Kindly Words and Spectacles: The Art of Barbara Pym
/Her merciless social scrutiny and crystal-perfect prose put Barbara Pym in the same league as Jane Austen -- and yet she languishes on the edge of obscurity. We offer a re-appraisal -- and a celebration.
Read MoreSecond Glance: The Strange Historical Romances of William Harrison Ainsworth
/Once considered a credible rival to Dickens and Thackeray, W. H. Ainsworth is nearly forgotten today. It's our loss: his historical novels - full of sensuous detail - run the gamut of romance and horror, tragedy and comedy.
Read MoreSecond Glance: Reading Anthony Trollope
/He wrote over 40 novels, many of which are classics, and that sheer quantity can be daunting. Rohan Maitzen tells us how best to approach the literary dynamo that was Anthony Trollope.
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