Close Reading Archives

Close Reading

Time Out of Joint In Richard McGuire’s Here

by Tim Peters,

“One learns about the characters the way a machine would, by analyzing discrete moments of their lives, like a search engine combing for patterns.”

Ayn Rand’s Rapture of the Rails

by Kevin Baker,

The train deaths of Atlas Shrugged

The Congressional Research Service Teaches Science to Congress

by Wayne Biddle,

A study in forced neutrality

In the Margins of Twelve Years a Slave

by Mary Niall Mitchell,

Tracing an original edition of Solomon Northup’s narrative to a slaveholder

The Tutelage of Charlotte and Emily Brontë

by Sue Lonoff de Cuevas,

The Brontë sisters’ devoirs on filial love, under the instruction of Constantin Heger

A Possible Urtext for Mad Men

by Thomas Frank,

James Kelly’s The Insider

Mad Men’s Too-Visible Man

by Jenny Diski,

Don Draper, non-enigma

The Worldly Prose of Thornton Wilder

by Michael Dirda,

How Wilder evokes the music of our lives