This interplay of death and eros produces a flight of words in Ulysses which signals our fundamental need to give birth to beauty—not simply in the body of another, but in eternity.

Daniel Fitzpatrick on love and death in Joyce’s writing

Muffled beneath the sounds of contemporary American life, the discerning reader will hear the reverberations of a question posed to Jesus: ‘And who is my neighbor?’

Charles Ducey on Tess Gunty's The Rabbit Hutch

Porter narrates how the things we choose to notice reflect the people we become… She encourages readers to pay attention to the warning signs that could lead to our own fates if we fail to keep watch.

Casie Dodd recovers Porter as a Catholic writer

We inheritors of the Cartesian dream believe that if we had enough knowledge, we could know the past and the future and could banish the fictions which for a hundred millennia have spelled our ruin.

Daniel Fitzpatrick on James Joyce and Thornton Wilder

If the fiction writer accepts the imitative laws of human interaction, then Rene Girard’s mimetic theory puts him in a tricky spot.

Trevor Merrill on writers and the problem of mimetic desire

Girard is not only an academic theorist but a veritable agent of culture who has shaped the thinking of writers around the world…. But where there is influence, there is also the potential for anxiety.

Trevor Merrill on novel writing after Girard