Classic Literature
Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.
Bram Stoker’s mother survived a terrible cholera outbreak and recounted the ghastly scenes to her son years later.
For the clarity of a “beginner’s mind” and a path to true and lasting wisdom, one must fully embrace “not-knowing.”
From forgotten Hollywood movies to Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” science fiction illustrates some of our deepest fears about technology.
Soviet censorship was thorough yet fallible.
500 sheep were slaughtered to produce the 2,060 pages of the “Codex Amiatinus,” a Latin translation of the Bible.
You can learn a lot about life through literature’s most unrespectable and heinous characters.
Forgetting and misremembering are the building blocks of creativity and imagination.
Reading classic books can inform you as much about the present as the past.
The fellowship’s journey through Middle-Earth mirrors the modernization of the English countryside.
Not every classic enjoyed rave reviews from the start.
Some authors never saw their books score widespread acclaim—or even get published at all.
Though Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” is a classic military treatise, its advice applies to all manner of conflict.
Try writing a novel without using the letter “e.”
Monsters have always represented societal fears, but narrative art also casts doubt on whether we fully understand our monsters — and their slayers.
Some classic books, like Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” remain controversial to this day.
What is Captain America doing in ancient Mesopotamia?
Jules Verne wrote about gasoline-powered vehicles, weapons of mass destruction, and global warming more than a century ago.
Take a trip through these master-crafted fantasy societies and ask yourself: Could I actually live there?
“Painfully forced” is how one contemporary critic described Fitzgerald’s writing style.
Would you want to live in any of these places?
Art criticism is inherently subjective. Still, many critics have tried to make a case for why some of the world’s most celebrated books are in fact terribly written.
Could the prevalence of flood myths around the world tell us something about early human migration or even the way our brains work?
These five great books should prompt us to work on what needs fixing the most in the world: ourselves.
A Cambridge Ph.D. student has solved a grammatical problem that has befuddled Sanskrit scholars since the 5th century BC.
When battles raged in ancient cities, their rocks blazed so brightly that they could be reoriented according to Earth’s magnetic field.
“Tristram Shandy” trolled its way to fame.
“All moments past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.”
From Atlantis to Thule, these mythical locales have captivated people’s imaginations for centuries.
Today’s scary clowns are not a divergence from tradition, but a return to it.