This month: one Brazilian, one Italian, one from the US, and three from the English tradition. All use historical settings to grapple with larger questions of human nature and the societies that shape us. A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens Dickens sets his novel across Paris and London in the years surrounding 1789 […]
Edmond Thornfield’s Atalanta of the Wild follows Atalanta, an Arkadian huntress raised in the mountain wilds, after the father who abandoned her returns seeking forgiveness. Lord Iásios invites her into the royal house of Tegea, where she meets siblings she once believed she would never know. Her bow has made her at home in the
Atalanta of the Wild | Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers’ Favorite Read More »
August turns toward six works that share a single obsession: the moment a soul, a marriage, or a kingdom comes apart under its own weight and what remains once it has. Othello (1603), William Shakespeare Othello, a Moorish general in the service of Venice, newly wed to Desdemona, is dispatched to defend Cyprus when his
Before I ever touched a computer, I touched lead. I was a child in Brazil in the 1970s and 80s, and I remember the weight of a form in my hands, the steel frame holding rows of metal letters and the thin strips of lead spacers that gave a line its breathing room. The compositors
Why Book Design Is an Apprenticeship, Not a Weekend Course Read More »
The prose is the most important element—everything else is complementary. The purpose of book design is not to make pages beautiful. It is to make the prose beautiful to read. Most conversations begin one step too late: which font, how much margin, what goes on the cover. Those considerations are downstream of a prior one
Why Human Writing Gets False Positives I. The Accusation An author submits a passage to a detector. The passage is his own, drafted and revised across weeks. A verdict displays on the screen: ninety percent AI-generated. He reads the number twice, certain some error has occurred, and finds none. The tool has not misread a
Are AI Detectors Accusing You of Writing With AI? Read More »
Writing Divine Presence in Bronze Age Fiction as Lived Reality Rather Than Abstraction. Mythological fiction has a problem that most writers fail to solve: the gods are either too large or too small. Made too large, they do not inhabit the story; they furnish it. Artemis stands for chastity, Aphrodite for desire, Athena for wisdom,
What the Mythological Tradition Preserves and What the Novelist Discovers Beneath It. There is a kind of silence in ancient sources that is not absence but compression. The authors who mention Atalanta—Hesiod in fragments, Pindar, Apollodorus, Diodorus Siculus, Pausanias, Ovid, Hyginus—do not bother to explain her. They assume their audience knows who she is. The
The question arrived before I wrote a single page of Asterios and the Labyrinth. I was standing by the reconstructed Tripartite Shrine at Knossos, watching other visitors move past without pausing, and I thought: I have to put a character here. He has to believe something about what he sees. And I do not know
Writing the Unknown: How Historical Fiction Reconstructs Ancient Greek Religion Read More »
On the distance between the Bronze Age world of Atalanta of the Wild and the Classical Greece readers bring to the page, and why that distance matters to the fiction. Most readers arrive at a Bronze Age novel carrying Greece with them—the Greece of the Parthenon, of the city-state, of the agora, and of the
