Posts by author

P.E. Garcia

  • An Illustration of Madness

    The Public Domain Review takes a look at John Haslam’s Illustrations of Madness, a book that is widely believed to be the first full account of paranoid schizophrenia.

  • Finding Dublin in Joyce’s Dubliners

    Why would a writer elicit that kind of hatred? What kind of threat did he pose? I asked my dad if I could borrow a copy of Ulysses, went to my room and began to read. An hour later I…

  • Fairy Tales Uncut

    The Guardian looks at a new English translation of the first edition of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales and finds stories that are much less child-friendly than the ones we know today.

  • Ghost Stories with Neil Gaiman

    Vulture spent time with Neil Gaiman perusing the special collections of the New York Public Library, which includes early drafts of Frankenstein, engravings from William Blake, and Jack Kerouac’s blood stains.

  • How Genre Can Be Useful

    In the New Yorker, Joshua Rothman talks about Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism and how genre can be a useful tool in examining fiction: Frye’s way of thinking is especially valuable today because it recognizes that the clash of genre…

  • Titles are Hard

    At The Millions, Chloe Benjamin talks to five authors about the process they used to name their books.

  • Finish What You Started

    But if a novel starts well and descends into trash, then it seems to me that it’s worth continuing to see if it gets better, or to see where the writer went wrong. And if it was bad from page…

  • The Girl Canon

    Those Boy Canon books were the ones that I read throughout the years I was in high school. And, let me make clear, I have no end of affection for those books…The problem, in hindsight, was that those books helped…

  • Finding Inspiration in Weird Places

    At this point, everyone knows about the Amtrak Residency, but the Smithsonian highlights some other unusual places artists can seek their inspiration, including a shack on the beach and a container on a cargo ship.

  • Learning about Short Stories through Films

    Birdman, the new film starring Michael Keaton, is centered around a theatrical adaptation of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” At Electric Literature, Halimah Marcus discusses what the film can teach writers about writing short…

  • The Influence of Being Under the Influence

    For the Public Domain Review, Richard Millington explores the influence of cocaine on the poetry of Georg Trakl and compares it to the ways other artists’ addictions have shown up in their work.

  • Designing the Future with the Past

    Holding it in your hand now, we hope it feels familiar and warm, at once reminding you of the great history of The Review, while also giving you a sense that you’re being handed the very future of writing and…