Reviews
One Wednesday, Struck Twelve: Mrs Dalloway and the Single Day
Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) perfected the novel of one day three years after Ulysses; a rereading finds the form was not a debt to Joyce but a verdict on plot.
Reviews: Tested and Rated
Reviews written after finishing the book, quoting enough to let a reader argue back. Each verdict states the ambition, assesses the execution, and places the title beside the work it descends from. Fiction, nonfiction and reissues all covered. For readers who want criticism with a position.
Reviews
The Slow Ascent: The Great Gatsby's Road Into the Canon
The Great Gatsby sold fewer than 25,000 copies in Fitzgerald's lifetime; a rereading traces how a wartime paperback program carried the 1925 novel into the American canon.
Reviews
The Better Original: One Hundred Years of Solitude in Translation
Gregory Rabassa's 1970 English version of One Hundred Years of Solitude became the book's second body — the author famously preferred it — and a rereading finds the praise deserved but misattributed.
Reviews
The Quiet Verdict: Rereading Invisible Man Seventy Years On
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) still argues with its country rather than decorating it; a rereading seventy years after its National Book Award finds the design intact and the blind spots instructive.