Ed Simon

1 week ago | 3quarksdaily.com | Ed Simon

Alternating with my close reading column, every even numbered month will feature some of the novels that I've most recently read, including upcoming titles. There was a meme that circulated a few years back amongst the tweedier of the interwebs which roughly claimed that when it came to literature, great French novels are about love, the Russians focus on existence, and Americans are concerned with money.

3 weeks ago | lithub.com | Ed Simon

John William De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Session to Loyalty might not have been the “Great American Novel,” but its author was the first who conceived of their being such a thing.

4 weeks ago | hyperallergic.com | Ed Simon

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. If you value our coverage and want to support more of it, please join us as a member. For nearly a millennium, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, with its columns, colonnades, and gleaming pyramid for a crown, overlooked the capital of the province of Caria in Asia Minor, before a series of earthquakes in the 13th century leveled the monument.

1 month ago | 3quarksdaily.com | Ed Simon

Impossible to know which one of those perennial evergreen subjects - love or death - poetry considers more, but certainly verse can be particularly charged when it combines those two. Love and death, the only topics worthy of serious contemplation, where anything else worth orienting the mind towards is merely an amalgamation of that pair.

1 month ago | hyperallergic.com | Ed Simon

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. If you value our coverage and want to support more of it, please join us as a member. PITTSBURGH — In 1935, a 26-year-old largely self-taught painter named Gertrude Abercrombie accompanied her friend, the writer Thorton Wilder, to a lecture at the University of Chicago in her native Hyde Park. There, she would meet the lecturer who would become a lifelong influence and mentor of sorts: Gertrude Stein.