Ed Simon is the Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, a staff writer for Lit Hub, and the editor of Belt Magazine. His most recent book is Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, the first comprehensive, popular account of that subject.
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.
O’Connor posits a universe in which we are mostly fallen but not lost to the possibility of salvation.
The New Yorker is responsible for the twentieth-century’s American high-brow voice.
SNL’s contemporary standing as an established institution has somewhat obscures its initial trailblazing daring.
Consider just how bizarre fiction is.
Anne Sexton is familiar with the dark night of the soul felt in the body.
Scheherazade’s story is about stories themselves.
H.P. Lovecraft’s verse advances a startlingly modern metaphysic.
If you read Frost for the snow, but don’t feel the cold, then you’re not really reading Frost