William Egginton

Jan 8, 2024 | worldliteraturetoday.org | William Egginton

New York. Pantheon. 2023. 368 pages. At first glance, the thinkers spotlighted in William Egginton’s book don’t necessarily belong together. Immanuel Kant, Jorge Luis Borges, and Werner Heisenberg worked in different fields, and the latter two made their breakthroughs more than a century after Kant’s death. But for Egginton, a prolific author of books on ethics, literary theory, and identity politics, such differences are secondary to the unlikely trio’s shared sense of purpose.

Sep 21, 2023 | audible.com | Emily Wilson |Lauren Groff |William Egginton |Daniel Mason

When Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017―rendering the ancient poem in contemporary language that was “fresh, unpretentious and lean” (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)―critics lauded it as “a revelation” (Susan Chira, New York Times) and “a cultural landmark” (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer’s other great epic―the most revered war poem of all time.

Sep 14, 2023 | qoshe.com | William Egginton

As history’s bloodiest war metastasised from Europe outward, two men – a world apart from each other, and coming from profoundly different disciplines – converged on one fundamentally similar idea. One of the men was a poet and short-fiction writer with middling success in his own country but virtually unknown outside its borders.

Sep 1, 2023 | shepherd.com | William Egginton |Benjamin Labatut |Adrian West |Carlo Rovelli

By William EggintonWho am I? I am a professor of humanities at Johns Hopkins and have spent my career thinking, teaching, and writing about the relations between literature, philosophy, and science. Many years ago I started out thinking I would be a scientist, but then got pulled into literature and philosophy. Still, that original passion never left me.

Aug 30, 2023 | lithub.com | William Egginton

Long before he gained fame as one of the world’s most beloved writers of children’s fiction, C. S. Lewis earned his reputation as a scholar of medieval literature. He taught this subject first at Oxford University before moving to Cambridge in 1954 to assume the newly created Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, a position he would hold for the rest of his career. One of the subjects Lewis lectured on at both storied schools was how people in the Middle Ages imagined the cosmos.