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
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
Six novels this month—two Brazilian, four from the European tradition—all concerned with what society does to people who fall outside its sanctioned arrangements. Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman (1891), Thomas Hardy Tess Durbeyfield is a farmer’s daughter whose family, learning of a distant, probably fictional connection to the ancient d’Urberville name, sends
There is a thread that runs through everything I write. It does not announce itself. It does not appear in chapter summaries or back-cover copy. But it is there in every novel, in every narrator’s voice, in every reunion between characters who meet for what the plot calls the first time and recognize each other
The Cosmological Thread: Souls Finding Each Other Across Lifetimes Read More »
There is a moment known to every writer who has ever chosen a nom de plume when the invented name becomes more real than the given one. I cannot say when that moment arrived for me. I know only that it has. The name Edmond Thornfield was not assembled at random. Each of its two
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Set on the island of Crete during the Minoan Bronze Age some 3,500 years ago, Asterios and the Labyrinth (Mythos of Knossos) by Edmond Thornfield is a tale of gods, kings, heroes, revolts, and magical powers. The Minoans, a wealthy people known for their farming and commerce, experienced some turbulence following the death of King
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Every novelist who works with ancient mythology eventually arrives at the same uncomfortable discovery: the sources disagree, they fall silent, or they compress into a few lines of poetry what would have taken days or weeks of human effort to accomplish. The Calydonian Boar Hunt presented me with those three problems, and the most instructive
Of all the gods of the Greek pantheon, Artemis is the one most commonly misread. Popular imagination has settled on her as a figure of cold severity, the virgin huntress, remote and punishing, more comfortable among animals than among people, quick to anger and slow to forgive. There is evidence for this reading in the
There is a particular dishonesty that runs through a great deal of fiction written by and about men, a tendency to grant male characters the external architecture of complexity without the internal substance of it. Men in such novels have ambitions, rivalries, codes of honor, and moments of violence, but their inner lives remain largely
I have spent a great deal of my writing life inside the minds of women. Atalanta, Elena, Pasiphaë, Costanza, Stella—the women of my novels are not secondary figures, not love interests arranged around a male protagonist. They are the story, or so much of it that the distinction barely holds. People sometimes ask me how
