Amit Majmudar
Entertainment and Excess: The Great Literary Audiences
At the most basic level, what’s success for a biological organism is success for a literary one—whatever survives, wins. A sequence of words has an effect on a given group of people. Time passes. Those people pass away. But…
Now or Never: The Writer and the Age
One thing that’s underestimated about writing is how now-or-never it is, how suddenly it crowds out of a few people. Many of the most powerful, permanent “ages” in literature have actually spanned less than a single writer’s lifetime—frequently, and I…
Albert Speer and the Berghof Omen
In Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, in a chapter detailing the autumn of 1939 as Hitler prepared to invade Poland, we find the following passage. In the course of the night we stood on the terrace of the Berghof…
Riddle me This
The riddle is wrongly considered a “lesser” or “lighter” kind of verse (“light” verse is implicitly considered “lesser” poetry, in contemporary literary convention). The riddle, in fact, is at once playful and profoundly religious. Consider how it enjoyed its…
The Two Gandhis
Takes on Mahatma Gandhi tend to focus either on the Mahatma or on the Gandhi: That is, they either consider him a holy man whose politics emerged from an inner “truth” or revelation about the nature of India and the Indian…
