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Benjamin Espen

The Long View: The Fall of the Roman Empire

The Long View: The Fall of the Roman Empire

One of the things I enjoyed the most about John J. Reilly's book reviews is that he was not only a gifted summarizer, able to quickly sum up the key points of a book, he was knowledgeable enough to critique and expand upon those key points in interesting

The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

A With Both Hands Mini-review The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum is a book so famous it is almost forgotten. That sounds like it should be impossible, but what I mean is that the story's very popularity has ensured that the plot and characters are enshrined

With Both Hands Classics: Harry Potter

With Both Hands Classics: Harry Potter

I have recently been listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks with my youngest son. He loved them so much that we listened to all seven books all the way through five or six times before I managed to finally get him to listen to something else [Percy Jackson to the

The Long View 2009-04-09: Meetings, Bloody Meetings

The Long View 2009-04-09: Meetings, Bloody Meetings

John's very anodyne title for this blog post doesn't do justice to what he was thinking about here. John was using fiction, in this case mostly H. G. Well's The Shape of Things to Come, as a launching point to consider how the world

Cirsova #19 Summer 2024

Cirsova #19 Summer 2024

There are now a number of contemporary short fiction magazines publishing sci fi, fantasy, and weird tales, and Cirsova may be pre-eminent among them. While sales of these little magazines are far below what similar publications managed in the pulp heyday, I love them for keeping great storytelling alive. Issue

The Long View 2009-03-27: The Government of Exotic Space

The Long View 2009-03-27: The Government of Exotic Space

John J. Reilly continues to offer up bon mots. Here is John sounding a bit like Patrick McKenzie on cryptocurrencies: The space in which the financial system functions is not physical but mathematical. The various markets are an ensemble of virtual spaces, some of which have grown larger and more

Northrop Frye on Allegory

Northrop Frye on Allegory

We are still in the the third phase of the Second Essay of the Anatomy of Criticism. This phase of symbolic interpretation got so big that I decided to split it into two parts. In the last installment, I promised to get into the much misunderstood concept of allegory. Allegory