Writer Geoff Dyer recounts a lunch where George Orwell’s wife, Sonia, and her husband’s biographer, Bernard Crick, almost came to blows over whether the famous writer did or didn’t shoot an elephant in Burma. (Nothing But,” by Geoff Dyer, Harper’s, May 2018, pgs. 73-74.)  A

In 2014, I wrote about the Intentional Fallacy, a term of literary criticism. (6/5/14)   The theory states that to understand a work of art, nothing is relevant except the piece itself.  Knowledge of the artist’s childhood or what he or she ate for breakfast has no bearing on int

Death and dying is a process as fearful for the artist as it is for the rest of us and immortality just as meaningless. But their manner of leave-taking should tell us something about the genius that purports to lift mystery’s veil on existence, at least a little. Dylan Thomas raile

It’s been 25 years since Salman Rushdie published his novel Satanic Verses and Iran’s head of state, the Ayatollah Khomeini, responded by charging him with blasphemy and placing a death sentence upon his head. Not surprisingly, Rushdie went into hiding when he heard the news.  Th