By Maria Bregman, writer and literary critic To read John Irving is to enter a world that is at once utterly familiar and profoundly strange.…
By Maria Bregman The word “inspiration” is in trouble. It has been hollowed out, flattened by a culture that prefers its heroes simple and its…
By Maria Bregman, writer and music critic To understand the year 2000, you have to understand Fred Durst. To see him then, at the absolute…
By Maria Bregman, writer and film critic To adapt a national epic is to walk a tightrope. On one side lies the abyss of slavish…
By Maria Bregman Language has always been a fluid, evolving entity, but the recent additions to the Cambridge Dictionary feel less like a gentle current…
By Maria Bregman, writer and literary critic Of all the great texts in the canon of political thought, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince remains the most radioactive. To…
By Maria Bregman, writer and literary critic In the late 1970s, Stephen King was already a name. He wasn’t yet the global institution he would…
By Maria Bregman, writer and literary critic The two decades between 1920 and 1940 represent a deep paradox in the European story. It was an…
By Maria Bregman To read R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface as a story about plagiarism is like reading The Great Gatsby as a cautionary tale about bad driving. It is a…
By Maria Bregman, writer and literary critic The name Stefan Zweig conjures an image of immense literary celebrity in the turbulent 1930s. His work was…