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"Hill House": Haunted by What Might Have Been

The great nonsense of cultural relativism has been superseded by personal relativism. Values are now relative to each person. Shirley...

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What Comes After Postmodernism?

Contemporary art theorist Thierry de Duve once wrote that art indicates “one of the thresholds where humans withdraw from their natural...

What's Significant About Crossover Characters?

Convergent, connected, crossover characters are everywhere. Almost by definition and certainly by design, they are appearing – and then...

What Good Can Come From Bad Books?

I was recently in the midst of inhaling (such was the speed and ease with which it was consumed) Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. I had begun...

Is the question "What is art?" worth asking?

Before Tony Shafrazi was seized by a guard at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, he managed to spray-paint three blood-red words across...

On Solitude, or "Why I Travel"

In The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch’s narrator, a star of the theatre in supernova, tells us that he has been writing over the course of...