• A black and white photograph of Hermann Gross holding a metalworking tool, with an in-progress sculpture before him.

Reading Joyce

2022 marks a hundred years since Sylvia Beach published James Joyce’s novel Ulysses in full. What better time to think about reading Joyce? A hundred years of readers and readings! Of course, that’s not the whole picture. Ulysses is also…

Why You Should Read Allan Ramsay’s ‘The Gentle Shepherd’

What Scottish play, published in 1725, reached over 100 printings by 1800, was called ‘the noblest pastoral’ by Robert Burns, inspired more than forty paintings, more than ‘from the entire works of Chaucer, Defoe, Swift, Richardson, or Fielding’ (R. Altick, Paintings from Books), and was performed by amateur companies throughout Scotland as late as the end of the 19th century?

Q&A with Patrick O’Connor

Q. Tell us a bit about your book A. Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned is really a book about the importance of philosophy for literature. In it, I look at how one writer uses philosophy to…