Posts by author

P.E. Garcia

  • The Torch That Guided Mandela

    …Nelson Mandela said to him, “You know, when I was in prison, it was you who changed the way I saw the world.” Brink believed that Mandela was “not addressing me in the singular, as an individual, but in the…

  • Neanderthals in 3D

    The Public Domain Review examines “the masterpiece” that is Marcellin Boule’s L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints, a book published in 1911 that includes early 3D images.

  • Emily Dickinson’s Self-Portrait

    I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the wren; and my hair is bold, like the chestnut bur; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass, that the guest leaves. For the Kenyon Review blog, Meg Shevenock…

  • Facebook and the Avant-garde

    …our Franzen problems, these days, are pretty minor. We don’t have to worry that Chip Lambert’s hand-wringing is going to reinforce the old, realist modes of romantic reaction. But we do have to worry about what happens to attempts to…

  • Stories That Must Be Told

    To read Alejandro Zambra is to engage with someone who writes as though the burden of history were upon him and no one else — the history of his country of Chile, of literature, and of humanity’s shared experience. You…

  • Open Endings

    From Chekhov to Woolf, to Colin Barrett and Eliza Robertson, the Guardian explores unresolved endings in short stories.

  • The Stories at the Edges

    There are novels like Wide Sargasso Sea and Wicked and Mary Reilly that retell stories we know from new angles, and there are whole worlds of fanfiction letting new voices speak, as Anne Jamison’s recent book Fic demonstrates so well.…

  • An Intro to New Media Lit

    At the Ploughshares blog, Matthew Burnside has a quick rundown on the evolution of the hypertext story and the emerging literature of the digital age.

  • A Dickensian History of Capitalism

    …we should return to the pages of Dickens and Trollope to remind ourselves that there were wrong ’uns at every level and turn of 19th-century commerce, from crooked agents, clerks, brokers and jobbers to ‘lords on the take, knights on…

  • Characters Aren’t the Enemy

    I’ll admit that I was so into sentence construction when I started working with Amy that I had zero interest in character development. Hempel subtly persuaded me, partially through introducing me to radical prose stylists who also care about their…

  • Jane Austen: Teen Historian

    Brain Pickings looks at Jane Austen’s “History of England,” a satirical pamphlet penned by the then 15-year-old Austen and illustrated by her sister Cassandra.

  • The Unforgettable Queen

    In the New Yorker, Garth Greenwell has a tribute to the Chilean writer, artist, and activist Pedro Lemebel.