The purpose of this essay is to look at J. D. Salinger’s concept of time as it is revealed in his short story “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” (“Esmé”). It is an early work of Salinger’s, published in The New Yorker on April 8, 1950, a year after his first short story “A Nice Day for Bananafish” appeared in that magazine. His seminal work, The Catcher in the Rye came out the year after “Esmé” and his last published work,

In her book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley says, “Heart of Darkness is a good example of how the best-intentioned most respected piece of fiction can develop into a social document when attitudes change and history overtakes the thematic material of a given work of art. A hundred years after publication, Conrad’s

The way we choose to remember the past has a significant impact on how we invent the future. In her book, Hard-Boiled Anxiety Karen Huston Karydes has chosen to remember three detective writers, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald through the lens of Freudian analysis. Not a random choice: In 1956 Macdonald underwent Freudian analysis following a tragic accident …

Sue Ellen Thompson’s, They, is uncommon for a book of poetry in that it distributes postcards written by her adult child, Thomasin, among finely-crafted poems. By collecting and curating these postcards, the author tells a story with this book that lies beyond the capacity of poetry alone to capture. What is that story? What is Thompson wishing to tell us by crafting a narrative that speaks through two disparate voices?

It is evening and we are in Director Behrens’ apartments in the sanatorium Berghof. Director Behrens; Hans Castorp, our protagonist; his cousin Joachim Ziemssen; and the narrator of The Magic Mountain are with us. The narrator is describing Hans Castorp’s reaction to a painting by Behrens of Frau Clavdia Chauchat, another sanatorium resident.