The Companion Blog to a Collection of Literary Impressions

"What were leaky roofs and cold hands and gray days and rock as compared with such riches of freedom and aloneness," Elliott Merri...

Like Machiavelli with The Prince , Sun Tzu wrote a manual containing instructions for matters of state, only the latter lived one thousand y...

Read the classics to learn how to write well – doesn’t everyone already know this? Apparently not, for the aptly-named Prose makes sure her ...

As I perused this collection, persistent questions tapped on my shoulder: Why do I read? Why do authors write? Why did they write these stor...

Unbelievably lengthy, exceedingly verbose, purposefully tedious, Tristram Shandy was one of those books whose Introduction was infinitely m...

Balzac designates Goriot "Pere," father, because the man devotes all he has to his two daughters. They define his amorphous existe...

The misguided romance between Dr. Zhivago and Lara is central to this book, and it parallels the Russians' fatal infatuation with social...