This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates. Said gentleman-scholar has re-upped his donation, so keep pitching me, academics longing for freedom. Many of us are justifiably sick of vampire stories. In the last decade, popular culture has been saturated by them, in forms ranging…

This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates. Said gentleman-scholar has re-upped his donation, so keep pitching me, academics longing for freedom.

In the mid-1890s, two Victorian writers made a bet over which one of them could create a more frightening literary monster. The

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Cut from the Classics brings your favorite novels to life as never before. Each month we present a profile of a character who originally appeared in the first draft of a major work of fiction, but was subsequently cut from the final draft. This insight into each author’s process brings a fuller, richer sense of their body of work. Previously: Monstra March. Book: Dracula Author: Bram Stoker Publication Date: 1897 Character: Glumba…

I always wanted to be Lois Lane. On Saturdays, I would watch Lois & Clark from beneath my mum’s potted plants and mock up copies of The Daily Planet on my stepdad’s typewriter. Sometimes, I pretended that the kitchen radio recorded the interviews that I conducted with the cat. The delusion stretched so far that I remember constructing elaborate fantasies in which an unknown, wealthy relative would one day send me a dictaphone. Only then…