Second Glance: Marilynne Robinson’s Psalms and Prophecy
/This month our regular feature is devoted to a study of the small but potent canon of Marilynne Robinson. Sam Sacks dives back into her famous fiction and formidable essays.
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 MoreBeethoven in the Soul
/Over time, the books of our youth make way for titles better suited to the grown-up readers we have become. But not all of them: YA or not, some books -- such as K. M. Peyton's Pennington trilogy -- deserve a lasting place on our shelves.
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: Another City
/Mark Wallace's novels won't be found at a Barnes & Noble, and that may be a shame beyond words: both Dead Carnival and The Quarry and the Lot reveal haunting truths and wrestle language into terrifying attitudes.
Read MoreSecond Glance: Her Hands Full of Sugar-Plums
/George Eliot's Middlemarch is beloved for its wit and wisdom. But behind its many beauties lurks a disquieting possibility: that misery is the price we must pay for morality.
Read MoreSecond Glance: Queen of the Gypsies
/Spoiler alert! It’s a familiar warning — but isn’t it also a silly one? There’s so much more to novels than their plots. And yet what if we're better readers for not knowing? Consider The Mill on the Floss, for example.
Read MoreSecond Glance: The Prince of the Powers of the Air
/Anthony Burgess is famous, but not for his best book. John Cotter sees your A Clockwork Orange and raises you the new Europa edition of Earthly Powers.
Read MoreSecond Glance: The Uncomfortable Chivalry of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe
/You think you know Ivanhoe: it's the original swash-buckling adventure story, full of fights, escapes, ambushes, and then, of course, a happy ending. But what you see if you look more closely may make you think twice about its chivalric ideals.
Read MoreSecond Glance: The Radicalism of Felix Holt
/Felix Holt, the Radical may be one of George Eliot’s least-read novels, but its questions about a democracy that puts power in the hands of "ignorant numbers" still have both moral and political resonance.
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: Over Grinton Bridge: Riding into the Heart of Reformation
/A rich, beautiful, but sadly neglected historical masterpiece: Hilda Prescott's The Man on a Donkey is the War and Peace of the English Reformation
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: Against the Wind
/It's one of the iconic bestsellers of the 20th century, an epic of love and war -- but how well does "Gone With The Wind" hold up, as a book? A personal journey through a problematic classic.
Read MoreSecond Glance: The Morality of Vanity Fair: It’s All About You
/Thackeray's seminal big baggy monster of a novel is a satiric romp across all levels of English society - and every bit as enjoyable now as it was when it was the talk of London in 1847
Read MoreSecond Glance: “Today belongs to few and tomorrow to no one”
/As Ingrid Norton reports, the eerie and heartbroken poems of W.S. Merwin's The Lice continue to resonate thirty years on: whispering, creeping, shaking.
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