How does literature say your love story should go?

Over the course of our lives, we all ingest hundreds of love stories. How do these stories inform our concept of love? How does literature say the human love story should go?

Who should paint Jane Eyre’s portrait?

If a picture's worth a thousand words, imagine what a picture from Vincent van Gogh or Leonardo da Vinci could tell you about your favorite book characters.

If Holden Caulfield was a girl…

would he have more friends? Would Elizabeth Bennett be quite so sassy if she was a man? And what would happen to Sherlock Holmes' intellect if he belonged to "the gentle sex?"

Jane Austen couples remixed!

Jane Austen was the queen of making opposites attract, but what if compatibility is really based on similarities? Check out these new (and improved?) matches!

Around the World in 10 Books

One of the things I'm most grateful to my parents for is their push for me to travel. By the time I was sixteen, I had tramped all over the United States and visited six countries. Not bad, especially since we always lived in the same small town in Tennessee (which I love dearly). Still, …

Les Miserables: Do You Talk to Yourself?

Two days ago, I decided to tackle Les Miserables' 2435 pages of, well, misery. I had avoided the book before, thinking it was strictly a right of passage for theater kids, but when I realized it was written by Victor Hugo (author of one of my favorite books, The Hunchback of Notre Dame), my opinion changed. …

6 Sickening Moments in Classic Literature

If you've ever taken a course in creative writing, you'll know that being on this list is a compliment! A writer's main goal is to manipulate his reader's emotions. The writers on this list manipulated my emotions so effectively that they bypassed all secondary and tertiary emotions and tapped into one of my primary emotions, …

Harry Potter and the Power of the Heptalogy

JK Rowling's Harry Potter books claim 7 of the slots in the top 10 bestselling books of all times. That's a stupefying statistic if I've ever heard one! Rowling's writing is enchanting in its own right. If she had stopped at Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the book still would have fared well with children. If she had wrapped Harry's …

The Age of Innocence: How a Pulitzer Prize Winner Breaks Rules

Wow! I hardly know where to begin praising Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. Normally, there is one aspect of a book that stands out to me as its superlative. In this case, mastery is suffused across every page. Prose is beautiful. Pacing is efficient. Characters are deep and fresh. Because I would never be able to …

Song of Achilles: Imagery of the Gods

Have any of you had one of those moments when your senses are all in harmony? The colors and shapes around you, the feelings in your heart, the taste on your tongue, the sounds in the background, the scent in the air? I had one of those moments at approximately 12:48 AM, Friday night. I was in …