Latest

"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The great nonsense of cultural relativism has been superseded by personal relativism.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...

Art Of Conversation is ad-free and relies entirely on the support of its readers.

If you find it valuable, you can subscribe through Substack to get essays delivered to your inbox and access the exclusive newsletter.

Subscribe to join the conversation.

Long Live the Death of the Novel

Can we save literature? At least according to Jakob Wasserman, in My First Wife, Vienna at the dawn of the twentieth century was in a...

"Call Me By Your Name"

What Makes a Good Adaptation? Question: What do fifth-dimensional aliens visiting Earth have to do with the love between two young men...

Look Again

Can We Be Better Readers? If I were of a different mind-set, I might have titled this essay ‘3 Ways To Be A Better Reader’. That,...

Arguing Semantics

Do Words Really Matter? A few years ago, an app was released that expunged ebooks – by choice of the individual reader – of a...

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...