Ed Simon is a staff writer for the online magazine The Millions and the author of many books, most recently Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology. He has written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Paris Review Daily, The New Republic, and Lapham’s Quarterly, among other publications.
The captivity narrative is the most American of genres, not just in fostering fear, paranoia, and violence but in contributing to the creation myth of a new variety of person: the American.
If you read Frost for the snow, but don’t feel the cold, then you’re not really reading Frost