Brian Patrick Eha

New York

Freelance Journalist and Writer at Freelance

Essayist, fiction writer, cultural critic | CUJ grad | Tweeting literature, history, ideas | Essays upcoming on Flaubert, Nick Cave, Celan, Emerson

Articles

Novelist Gustave Flaubert’s Pursuit of Literary Perfection

2 weeks ago | city-journal.org | Brian Patrick Eha

In any age, the significant individuals tend to be those who invent or seize upon a new means, a new medium, a new method, a fresh voice or device, and embody or exercise or exploit it to the fullest.
Heresy Costs | Brian Patrick Eha

Nov 18, 2024 | firstthings.com | Brian Patrick Eha

About one-third of the way into Nick Cave's Southern Gothic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989), the false prophet Abie Poe leads a congregation of three hundred souls in a blackly comic parody of baptism. Urged on through a downpour, the maddened throng fetches up at a “cloacal sump” of sewage-polluted swampland, into which the mad evangelist bids them plunge and be purified.
The Boundary Between Life and Terror

Jun 1, 2024 | city-journal.org | Brian Patrick Eha

At midnight on Christmas Day, 1910, a sleepless legal clerk of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague was chastising himself for the state of his writing desk.
Claremont Review of Books

May 14, 2024 | claremontreviewofbooks.com | Brian Patrick Eha |Dennis Hale |Jeffrey Anderson |Helen Andrews

They cannot scare me with their empty spacesBetween stars—on stars where no humanrace is. I have it in me so much nearer homeTo scare myself with my own desert places. —Robert FrostPicture Cormac McCarthy in Ibiza.
No Living with the Killing | Brian Patrick Eha

Apr 2, 2024 | firstthings.com | Brian Patrick Eha

Midway through the brutal Western film The Proposition (2005), there is a crucial moment when the outlaw Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) trains a six-gun on his elder brother and erstwhile partner-in-crime, Arthur, who is butchering a man. Arthur (Danny Huston) hears the hammer click behind him and freezes. But no shot rings out. “Why can’t you ever just stop me?” rasps Arthur, as if pained. Finally, his brother shoots—to end the dying man’s suffering with a bullet between the eyes.
January 2024 | Print Edition | First Things

Dec 8, 2023 | firstthings.com | Meir Soloveichik |Brian Patrick Eha |Robert Miller |Liel Leibovitz

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Rossetti the Unmodern | Brian Patrick Eha

Dec 1, 2023 | firstthings.com | Brian Patrick Eha

Life wreathes flowers for death to wear. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), who said as much, is dead and gone, his sonnets deader still, if we may judge by classroom syllabi and the infrequency with which his name appears in the leading periodicals. He still crops up half a dozen times a decade in the London Review of Books, and BBC Two broadcast a miniseries in 2009 about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but the English are built different when it comes to the canon.
Of What Use Was The Road?

Sep 26, 2023 | port-magazine.com | Brian Patrick Eha

Bitcoin and Silk Road, from 2015He was contrite at his sentencing, though not before. The lank 20-vear-old whom federal agents dragged stone-faced out of a public library in San Francisco on the first of October, 2013, was inwardly all defiance, bursting with delusions of grandeur. A revolutionary, he believed he was changing the world.
Ghostified

Jul 1, 2023 | city-journal.org | Brian Patrick Eha
Mike Meyers Is Selling His Manhattan Penthouse for $20 Million

May 3, 2023 | entrepreneur.com | Sam Silverman |Brian Patrick Eha