In both her life and her narrow but vivid body of work, Carson McCullers claimed a secure (albeit marginal) perch in American literature’s Southern renaissance Gothic wing. More so than with her kinswomen Flannery O’Connor and Eudora... Read More

“I petition not for my own life, for I know I must die, [but that] if it be possible, no more innocent blood may be shed, which it undoubtedly cannot be avoided in the way and the course you go in,” said Mary Esty in her second... Read More

The author characterizes Russia’s Silver Age as the period in the early twentieth century when the country’s culture and art evolved from critical realism to aestheticism, and the “pyrotechnic outburst of Russian modernism”... Read More

One of children’s author Wanda Gág’s favorite sayings was: “There are times when it is necessary to do the impossible.” The artist, who lived from 1893 to 1946, is a central figure in this family biography. She followed her... Read More

Historians are always interested in reading skillfully collected sources from the past. For this reason, the editor, professor of Russian literature and culture from the University of Notre Dame, should be commended for this book, a... Read More

Whether or not one verbalizes a like or dislike of opera, everyone, according to the author, has been “raised culturally on something very close to opera”—the movies. Elements of opera are evident in a wide variety of films,... Read More

Here is a dazzling exploration of espionage—“the art of the possible” in “a wilderness of mirrors.” The narrative surges forward from the peril-fraught Berlin of the 1950s through the doomed Hungarian Uprising, the botched Bay... Read More

“There are just two things you have to do when you are very unhappy, and you must do one or the other. Get down to work, or do something for someone else.” This was writer Iris Origo’s take on life, as explained to her youngest... Read More