In this second part of three on the decline and fall of Rome, based on a reading of the Penguin Classic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged Edition, by Edward Gibbon, ed. David Womersley, 764 pages), we're talking primitive Christianity and Gibbon's take on how the pagan Roman faith with its idolatrous statues and temples was eroded, attacked and at last brought down by the followers of Jesus. Originally published March 24, 2025

It's inauguration time, so this is part 1 of 3 and we'll be talking the fall of the Roman empire.  I know these pages are usually devoted to fiction and novelists, and the subject does sound pretty heavy.  But once you've read it, there won't be any way for you not to recommend the Penguin Classic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged Edition, by Edward Gibbon, ed. David Womersley, 764 pages) to everybody you know. Originally published January 24, 2025

Lately, I've been thinking it's a very good thing we had Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe and Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins and others to formulate both the Goth sensibility and the Romantic sensibility for us way back in the day.  It's also really wonderful how the Goth thing and the Romantic thing, once launched, have just continued to roll along year by year, reusing the same tropes of star-cross'd loves and castles, flashy rides and darkness and evil, bubbling cauldrons, melancholy and madness, and falling-down mansions and thunder and lightning again, again, again.  Originally published November 12, 2024

The theme of the July newsletter is Pairings. I also want to recognize the importance of Juneteenth last month and the recent passing of the great Alice Munro, a story writer who can be credited with helping to bring realism back from the brink in the 80s, after it was almost swallowed by the Beats and post-modernists of the 60s and 70s. Originally published July 10, 2024