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 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…
Speculative fiction has long functioned as a form of architectural drafting. For decades, the genre was defined by its literal structures: orbital ring-stations, subterranean arcologies,…
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 There is a particular strain of modern historical fiction that offers its readers a terrible comfort. It takes a monumental injustice, an…
By Maria Bregman There is a version of Latin America that exists primarily for export. It is a continent of the senses, a place of…
By Maria Bregman André Maurois wrote biographies, but he was less a historian of facts and more a sculptor of character. In the lives of…