Posts by author
P.E. Garcia
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Literary Rumors
Flavorwire has a rundown of literary rumors, including speculations about Sylvia Plath’s death, Edgar Allan Poe’s drug addiction, and Stephen King’s Halloween traditions.
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The 1906 Novel That Predicted the Future
…what makes “The Doomsman” fascinating is its vision of an abandoned New York City as “a wilderness of brick and mortar”—a land where the Financial District is ruled by owls, and where the Flatiron Building is prized primarily by archers…
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Why We Need Claudia Rankine
There’s the persistent seduction of collective amnesia, our desperate wanting to embrace a mythology that we’ve evolved. We want to erase the nightmarish truth that at one time, we were the kind of people who would inflict unspeakable cruelties to…
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A Family of Charm, Wolves, and Turnips
Folk tales are a shared genealogy. To read them is to recognize where one story descends from another, to learn the preoccupations of the storytellers and their communities, to make note of universal tales whose concerns are eternal, and to…
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A Comic History of Rome
The Public Domain Review takes a look at The Comic History of Rome, a book that satirized Roman history as well as Victorian society.
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The Post-Apocalyptic Present
For a smart writer, a ravaged future world also offers something like a perfect literary playground, a cleared field where everything from language to human psychology to social convention can be reconsidered and reframed, critiqued or reimagined. The Millions reviews…
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Exploring Secret Spaces
The inscription—the handwriting of a person to whom I’m related, but who has always been, for me, unreachable, unknowable—wrapped an additional layer of mystery around this book about mystery. I wonder if that’s part of why I loved the story…
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When Poets Ate Peacock
The New Yorker recalls the night that Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats met over a dinner of peacock, and examines the role of public relations in the life of a poet.
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It’s War and Peace, Charlie Brown
For the Kenyon Review blog, Meg Shevenock writes about how Charlie Brown made her scared of Tolstoy’s classic and how she worked to overcome her fear.
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Black and White Portraits from the Harlem Renaissance
Van Vechten took to Zora Neale Hurston and especially to Langston Hughes. Biographies tell us that Hughes didn’t doubt Van Vechten’s sincerity, but he worried nevertheless how their connection would look in Harlem. Countee Cullen would eventually sit for Van…
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Writing Fiction to Master Fear
Writing fiction, to me, feels a bit like the moment in those Roadrunner cartoons where he runs off the cliff and the bridge builds itself underneath his feet. You see the planks of wood flying up, supporting him, but if…
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Jenny from the Book
Jennifer Lopez’s latest film, The Boy Next Door, has inspired a sudden surge in interest in “first editions” of The Iliad. AbeBooks has more details.