Category: Romanticism

CREATURE is forthcoming in 2025!

Delighted to announce that my novel Creature: A Novel of Mary Shelley and FRANKENSTEIN will be published by Sea Crow Press in the spring of 2025. Students, friends, and family know this has been a long journey (especially to get its first draft of 236,000 words down to a manageable length!), but I am thrilled […]

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R.I.P., Julian Sands (1958-2023).

It’s official: actor Julian Sands has passed at age 65, after disappearing while hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains. He was a great actor – and also a genuine aficionado of literature. His work offered me an artist’s great gift: a small-town kid’s early intuition that the world can be grand and beautiful beyond its […]

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Fake Drake, boxing, and Byron.

“May you live in interesting times,” says an apocryphal Chinese curse. And for a Romanticist writing about Byron, boxing, and the celebrity culture of Regency England, the news that AI can now fake even more human creations is “interesting” indeed. Now AI has made a “song” by Drake and The Weeknd that neither artist authorized […]

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Almost too easy.

Teaching can be a challenge. But then life hands you an event that banishes questions about the “relevance” of multiple texts you’re teaching, all at once. Come for the Frankenstein, stay for the Half-Earth, Our Malady, and Nineteen Eighty-four. (With a side of Mrs. Dalloway – what IS that thing in the sky everyone’s looking […]

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Boxing talk at Highgate Cemetery, rescheduled for Jan. 11, 2023!

Delighted to share that on Jan. 11, 2023 (rescheduled from Nov. 24), I’ll be speaking in person at Highgate Cemetery about Pierce Egan and Tom Sayers, who are buried at Highgate Cemetery, and the complex, bloody world of nineteenth-century English boxing, which fascinated Lord Byron and John Keats. More at the Highgate Cemetery website.

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Creature and cat.

Behold a new marvel in the annals of Frankenstein memorabilia – a life-size wooden chair I’ve just purchased from its creator, local artist Tom Sheppard. As you can see, nonhuman beings can look past the Creature’s appearance and detect his inherent benevolence. 🙂

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What would Wollstonecraft say?

Since we’re apparently being held captive as a nation to what writers were thinking in 1788, let’s go back to 1792, when Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. What might Wollstonecraft, landmark English feminist, say about the not-entirely-unexpected but still devastating decision today by the Supreme Court, 6-3, to overturn Roe […]

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