Tag: Literary criticism
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My Best Reads of 2025
Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all who celebrate! Here we are at the end of another reading year, so it must be time to drop my favorite books list again. I don’t feel like my best-ofs this year are as diverse as some in the past, but I had a couple that were similar…
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When the Corn is as High as an Elephant’s Eye: A Not-So-Serious Look at Pliny’s Naturalis Historia (Part Two)
As promised, this week we’re back with Pliny the Elder and his Natural History, and we’re here to tackle Books 12-27, the dreaded plant books. Since we’ve already introduced Pliny and his general deal, we’ll pretty much delve straight in, but if you missed the first part, you can find it here. As with the…
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A Renaissance Friendsgiving: Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron
“For a long time I have cherished all the many excellent gifts that God bestowed upon you; prudence worthy of a philosopher; chastity; moderation; piety; an invincible strength of soul, and a marvelous contempt for all the vanities of this world. Who could keep from admiring, in a great king’s sister, such qualities as these,…
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More Midcentury(ish) Roman Historical Fiction: John Williams’ Augustus and Evelyn Waugh’s Helena
Because I thought that with Daughter of Scorpions’ publication this spring, I was finally leaving the historical ancient Mediterranean behind (…we’ll see—I’ve been having intrusive thoughts recently about a fifth God’s Wife book…), I’ve been reading a bunch of other people’s Rome-adjacent novels. In February, we talked about two of them, Thornton Wilder’s The Ides…
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A Not-So-Serious Look at Pliny’s Naturalis Historia (Part One)
Like with the English literature canon, I have reached a point where I’ve read a lot of the “normal” stuff in the Classical canon, and I am now left with plumbing the depths of the more esoteric stuff. Pliny the Elder’s massively influential Naturalis Historia (Natural History) may not, at first blush, seem like a…
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Egypt Under the Sun: Agatha Christie’s Akhnaton
AKHNATON: More lands, more subject peoples, bigger palaces, still greater temples to Amon, thousands of beautiful women where my father had hundreds? No, Horemheb, listen to my dream. A kingdom where men dwell in peace and brotherhood, foreign countries given back to rule themselves, fewer priests, fewer sacrifices. Instead of many women—one woman. A woman…
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Shadow of the Colossus: Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Elinor Wyllys and Other Work
“Writing may be a very pleasant pastime; but printing seems to have many disagreeable consequences attending every stage of the process” – Elinor Wyllys, author preface “‘Yes,’ replied Mrs. Bernard; ‘but it is a pity her face should be so ugly; for she has rather a pretty figure—‘“ – Elinor Wyllys, chapter 2 Whew wee,…
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She’s Just Not That Into You: Orlando Furioso and the Making of the Modern European Novel
Who will ascend to heaven, mistress mine, to fetch me back my lost wits? (Orlando furioso, XXXV.2) Before we get into Orlando, I did want to assure some of you that I didn’t forget about giving updates about the release of my next novel, Daughter of Scorpions. I would personally love to have a concrete…
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Knowing It When You See It: Fanny Hill, Her Literary Sisters and Her Legacy
“…our virtues and our vices depend too much on our circum-stances…” (Fanny Hill, p. 77) I recently read John Cleland’s infamous novel Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748/9), and while not really a piece of high literature, it got me thinking about a whole host of other banned/censored books and…
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American Authors in the First Millennium: Zora Neale Hurston’s The Life of Herod the Great and Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March
While it’s hard to ever call historical fiction set in the Roman period passé, I do sometimes feel like I’m out here on an island, as it seems most of the current genre zeitgeist is for almost entirely 20th century historical fiction, with a few forays into midcentury Victorian. But as I’m pretty much never…
Sarah Holz 