Themes & Projects

Mysteries, December 2008–January 2009

Maritime literature, January–March 2009

Melville read-through, part I, TypeeWhite-Jacket, December 2009–January 2010

Whirlwind tour of Russian literature, February–May 2010

Epistolary literature, July 2009–June 2010

Melville read-through, part II, Moby-DickBilly Budd, July–September 2010

The Unstructured Clarel Readalong, August–September 2010

The Art of the Novella Challenge, August 2011

The bibliographing Reading Challenge, January 2011–present



Authors

“Unlock the abodes of Elysium and call forth/Death herself, and force her to confess to me/which ones of us she’s hunting.”

I like to do requests when I can, and sadly I was not able to fulfill one last week about Erictho, the amazing witch who appears in Book VI of Civil War. Not only that, but David beat me to it with this excellent post, which you should absolutely read if a grisly [...]

The Letters of Alciphron

Alciphron was an ancient Greek epistolographer. We don’t really know when he lived, but we have 116 fictional letters he wrote, supposed to have been by fishermen, farmers, parasites, and courtesans.

I’ve only read a selection, but I really enjoyed them. They are narrative letters about daily life: yesterday’s catch, a disobedient child, [...]

Heroides by Ovid

Letter-writing is hardly a modern activity, and there were many epistolographers among the ancients I would like to read someday. I went with fiction: Ovid’s Heroides, a series of fictional letters between mythic figures. The first group are all single letters from a woman to a man; these are followed by three exchanges.

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