Category: Uncategorized
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The Girl Who Lived: Historical People and the Question of Ethics in Historical Fiction
This entry is going to broadly discuss historical fiction, and the framing of two novels, Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979) and Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy (2012) in particular. While normally I wouldn’t post spoiler warnings for two books forty-four and eleven years old respectively, because both books’ synopses play the historical denouement of…
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Release Day for *The Flight of Virtue*
Apologies for a second sales post in a week, but as promised, I just wanted to remind all of you that my latest book, THE FLIGHT OF VIRTUE is fully live today on all digital storefronts! I’m so excited to bring you this brand new story that is part historical fiction, part alternative history, and…
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Book Release + Sale Announcement!
I try not to spam all of you with too many promotional posts, but I did want to let everyone know that my next book, The Flight of Virtue will be available for purchase this Friday, (2/3/2023) at all online digital retailers for the ebook ($2.99) and Amazon for the paperback edition ($14.00). For a…
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Canada Emptor: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush and the Early Immigrant Literature of the Great White North
“Home! The word had ceased to belong to my present it was doomed to live for ever in the past; for what emigrant ever regarded the country of his exile as his home?” – Susanna Moodie, Roughing it in the Bush (Chapter II) As I’ve mentioned a few times, I spent the overwhelming bulk of…
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A (Fake) True Story: Lucian and the Birth of Modern Sci Fi
“To put yourself in another man’s shoes and say what he would of said was a regular exercise of the schools, but to laugh in your sleeve as you said it was not the way of the ordinary rhetorician.” – A.M. Harmon (introduction to Phalaris) Okay, as promised, we’re going to talk about Lucian (c.…
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Reading in Review: My Best Books of 2022
Well, my lovely readers, we’ve managed to make it to the end of another year, and while all signs point to 2023 not likely to be existentially any easier, making it to the new year is always to be commended. I had intentions of doing an entry on the satirist Lucian this week, but I…
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Accidental Adventures in Antiquity: The Works of Ausonius
“For when the Emperor Octavianus was reigning, they [the Golden Age poets] vied with one another in presenting him with their works, and set no limit on to the number of the poems which they composed to his praise. You may be sure that though he may perhaps have admired these authors as much as…
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The Seven Against the Seven Hills: The Ancient-Medieval Mashup of the Roman de Thèbes & the Roman d’Eneas
“If lord Homer and lord Plato, and Virgil and Cicero, had concealed their knowledge, there would never have been any talk of them. For this reason I do not wish to keep my intelligence hidden, or to suppress my knowledge, rather does it please me to recount something worthy to be remembered.” — Roman de…
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Pandemic, Populism, and Panorama: The 58th Carnegie International
I’ve already talked about how a relatively provincial city like Pittsburgh ended up with a world class modern art museum (robber baron blood money). What you may not know is that aside from creating the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) itself, Gilded Age steel magnate Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) also championed formal exhibitions of contemporary art…
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Travels with Hadrian: Julia Balbilla, Her Poetry, and Ancient Tourism
In my entry about the two(?) Sulpicias, I said that she/them were the only Roman women poets that we have a record of—but that’s not strictly true. We have one more, the equally sketchily-known Julia Balbilla (72 – after 130 CE), but perhaps what we can mean is that the Sulpicias are the only Italian…
Sarah Holz 