Introduction What happens to a person who gets everything, and then loses it all?That question has followed me for years. Not as a history lesson, but as something closer to home. Most of us will never conquer a continent. But almost everyone climbs something. A career, a business, a dream, a family. And sooner or later, almost everyone reaches the moment … [Read more...] about What If You Could Interview Napoleon on Saint Helena?
meaning of life
Middlemarch: What If George Eliot’s Characters Met Again?
Introduction Middlemarch by George Eliot: What If the Characters Met Again After Death?What if Dorothea Brooke could finally ask Edward Casaubon whether he had ever truly loved her?What if Lydgate and Rosamond could confront the question that haunted their marriage: Who was really responsible for their unhappiness?And what if the characters of George Eliot's … [Read more...] about Middlemarch: What If George Eliot’s Characters Met Again?
The Sun Also Rises Centennial Stories: 5 Modern Lives
Introduction The Sun Also Rises Today: Five Stories About the Life That RemainsA century after The Sun Also Rises, the world looks almost nothing like Hemingway’s. We carry entire libraries in our pockets. We can work from another continent, choose from thousands of potential partners, reinvent careers, cross oceans overnight, and remain connected almost … [Read more...] about The Sun Also Rises Centennial Stories: 5 Modern Lives
The Sun Also Rises Themes & Analysis: Questions That Still Matter
Introduction A hundred years after The Sun Also Rises first appeared, the world surrounding Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley is almost unrecognizable. The wars are different, travel is faster, relationships are mediated through phones, gender roles have changed, and people possess freedoms Hemingway’s characters could scarcely have imagined. Yet the novel’s … [Read more...] about The Sun Also Rises Themes & Analysis: Questions That Still Matter
The Sun Also Rises Centennial: Are We a Lost Generation?
Introduction One hundred years after The Sun Also Rises first appeared in 1926, Ernest Hemingway’s characters still feel unexpectedly close to us.Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, Robert Cohn, Pedro Romero, and Bill Gorton lived in the shadow of the First World War. They inherited a world in which familiar ideas about patriotism, masculinity, love, religion, … [Read more...] about The Sun Also Rises Centennial: Are We a Lost Generation?
War and Peace Lessons for Modern Life: 5 Short Stories
Introduction What happens when life refuses to become the story we expected?In Parts 1 and 2 of this War and Peace trilogy, Tolstoy's characters and later Tolstoy himself with literary scholars explored a similar question from different directions. Plans collapse. History exceeds individual control. Love can contain devotion and injury at the same time. … [Read more...] about War and Peace Lessons for Modern Life: 5 Short Stories
War and Peace: An Imaginary Conversation on Life
Introduction What if the life we keep trying to reach is making us overlook the people already beside us?In Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, ambition, love, faith, and family unfold within events no individual can fully control. People pursue recognition, belonging, certainty, and happiness. Then life interrupts. A battle changes the meaning of glory. A … [Read more...] about War and Peace: An Imaginary Conversation on Life
Love As If You’ve Never Been Hurt: 25 Book Club Questions
Introduction What can a poem actually do when something in life cannot be fixed?That question lies at the center of this second exploration of Love As If You've Never Been Hurt, the anthology edited by Korean poet Ryu Si-hwa.In Part 1, we approached the collection through an imagined conversation about wounds, healing, love, mortality, and the challenge of … [Read more...] about Love As If You’ve Never Been Hurt: 25 Book Club Questions
Martyr Kaveh Akbar Inspired Stories: 5 Emotional Tales
Introduction What happens after we stop asking why suffering happened and begin asking what to do with the life that remains?That is the central movement of these five modern stories inspired by Kaveh Akbar's Martyr!.Parts 1 and 2 explored grief, martyrdom, addiction, faith, identity, art, forgiveness, sacrifice, and the human desire to make suffering … [Read more...] about Martyr Kaveh Akbar Inspired Stories: 5 Emotional Tales
Martyr Kaveh Akbar Analysis: Meaning, Death & Suffering
Introduction What if the hardest question in Martyr! is not whether death can have meaning, but why human beings feel such a powerful need to make suffering mean something?Cyrus Shams has spent much of his life searching for an answer.His mother was supposedly killed when Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down. His father lived a difficult immigrant life raising … [Read more...] about Martyr Kaveh Akbar Analysis: Meaning, Death & Suffering