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Happy New Year! This has been an enormous year for me in terms of both reading and writing. I completed two biographical entries for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 391, due to be printed in 2023. I researched and interviewed two prolific YA authors whose novels I’ve enjoyed for years, Maggie Stiefvater and Elizabeth […]
Read MoreToday is Ben Jonson’s 450th birthday. He’s not around to celebrate, of course, so I’ll raise a glass in his honor and re-read Bartholomew Fair, my favorite of his plays and the source of my career. I wrote about Ben himself on this straggly blog 9 years ago, and don’t have anything to add to […]
Read MoreI just finished Lauren Groff’s Matrix and wow! Here’s the review I posted on Goodreads: Marie de France has been imagined in historical fiction before; she’s a tempting subject because her life story is a blank and we have only her gorgeous writings: Lanval, Bisclavet, the Fables, the lais, the legends of the saints. Lauren […]
Read MoreHere are a few of the recent reviews I’ve posted on Goodreads that are not for Historical Novels Review — my favorite reads of 2021 so far… The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue (Little, Brown & Co.) Even putting aside this astounding novel’s accidental timeliness, it renders with laser focus a historical moment […]
Read MoreAnother favorite, reviewed in the November 2019 issue of Historical Novels Review — Sarah Donati’s Where the Light Enters (Berkeley, 2019): This long, absorbing novel is the sequel to Donati’s enthusiastically received The Gilded Hour, a multi-family epic centered on the lives of Anna and Sophie Savard, cousins who attempt to further the cause of medical […]
Read MoreThe final 40 days of this unprecedented — and for many of us, unprecedentedly awful — year are upon us. It’s also the close of my sabbatical semester, one activity of which has been getting this blog and website up and running again. I thought I’d make it easy on myself by starting out with […]
Read MoreI had the pleasure of interviewing bestselling author Gregory Maguire for a feature on his new novel, A Wild Winter Swan, for November 2020 issue of Historical Novels Review. You can read it here: Re-Imagining New York: Gregory Maguire’s Novel, A Wild Winter Swan
Read MoreThe Four and Twentieth of August! Bartholmew-day! Bartholmew upon Bartholmew! there’s the Device! who would have mark’d such a Leap-Frog Chance now? When John Little-wit, Ben Jonson’s would-be playwright whose day-job is law-clerking, discovers that a client named Bartholomew Cokes plans to get betrothed in Bartholomew Fair, on the feast day of St. Bartholomew (August 24), he delights in […]
Read MoreThere has been a lot of reaction, good and bad, to the news that the Hogarth Press, an imprint of Random House, plans to commission bestselling authors to write novels based on and updating Shakespeare’s plays. The project has a noble purpose – to honor the upcoming 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death in 1616 […]
Read MoreToday is the birthday (in 1566) of James VI & I of Scotland and England. Although Shakespeare and Jonson are classified as Elizabethan poets, it was under the reign of James, and under his personal patronage, that they both did their greatest work. James called himself “The Cradle King,” quite accurately, because he took over […]
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