The Rambling

06/02/2024

Lucina Schwartz on the figure of the fop in the hit television show .

In this essay, Lucina C. Schwartz offers new insights and historical contexts for understanding the foppish characters of the hit show, Our Flag Means Death—and why fabric is Stede and Ed’s love language.

05/02/2024

Bethany Johnsen Creed and author Devoney Looser talk historical fiction, recovering forgotten women novelists, and writing for the public.

A year after the publication of Devoney Looser’s Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës, Bethany Creed sits down with the author for a conversation that rambles through and around topics including Hilary Mantel and Mary Bennet, writing publ...

02/02/2024

Megha Agarwal on how still speaks to her life “despite being separated…by a century and a half, by continents and culture.”

In this (re)reading of Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women, Megha Agarwal unravels the shapeshifting nature of narratives and the self, asking such questions as: How do the stories that transformed us in our childhood change when we revisit them as adults? And what came first, the transmutable ...

01/02/2024

Lee Reilly on stealing her grandmother’s copy of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle at age ten and carrying it across seven states and five decades.

Lee Reilly rereads Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, which she first read and stole at the age of ten. A lifetime later, the real reasons for stealing Dodie Smith’s coming-of-age novel suddenly become clear.

31/01/2024

Matthew Luter on ’s "Dear Mr. Henshaw," dirty realism, and children’s fiction as “windows” and “mirrors.”

In this personal essay, Matthew Luter revisits a favorite children’s book of his youth, Beverly Cleary’s Dear Mr. Henshaw, discovering anew how Cleary’s book was a gateway to some of his favorite writers as an adult—and examining the transformative power of finding characters who reflect you...

30/01/2024

Alison Conway on the very eighteenth-century literary resonances of Walter Farley's "The Black Stallion."

How does the story of a boy and a horse sustain the romance of a girl stepping out into her own island world? Alison Conway’s personal essay considers how reading a work of children’s literature, The Black Stallion (1941), led her to love Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) decades later.

29/01/2024

Kate Nolan on how teaching Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go healed her relationship with reading.

In this personal essay, Katherine Nolan writes about her experience teaching Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go to high school students—and about falling back in love with novels after completing her Ph.D. in English.

26/01/2024

Shawn Lisa Maurer on Sense and Sensibility’s Elinor Dashwood and her own experience of losing a parent early in life.

In “I Am Elinor Dashwood,” Shawn Lisa Maurer explores her deep affiliation with the caretaking older sister of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, unpacking how Elinor’s emotional suppression mirrors her own silent strength when, at seventeen, she lost her mother to breast cancer. Interweav...

25/01/2024

Aaron Santesso on eighteenth-century literature’s troubling absence from banned book lists.

The dramatic rise in book-bans raises a simple question: why are eighteenth-century literary works so rarely banned? Are they not risqué enough? Are they not progressive enough to be targeted by conservative activists? Aaron Santesso investigates the curious case of non-banned eighteenth-century li...

25/01/2024

Hold the rotary phone! This new interview in the The Rambling, from a conversation about Sister Novelists with Bethany Johnsen Creed, was so much fun. And look at this fabulous image created to go along with it. I hope you'll have a look at it, as well as at the other new pieces in this terrific issue. https://the-rambling.com/2024/01/21/issue16-johnsen-looser/

24/01/2024

It’s time to enjoy our new issue, featuring even more encounters with favorite books from our youth, plus: the eighteenth century in conservative thought, q***r pirates on the high seas, and a conversation with Sister Novelists author Devoney Looser!

https://the-rambling.com/?fbclid=IwAR08hLxqNALiow_Sx4fpT54NklG07a-bG1JyR1GAB3_TrueMzIuR0JVCzDs

20/04/2023

Re-reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Ben Pladek has a different read on martyrdom and "the corrosive sublime."

How post-transition reread of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables helped B. Pladek understand the novel not as a romance of martyrdom, but as a troubling reflection on why Hugo's readers, and Hugo himself, love stories of sacrifice.

19/04/2023

Maya Little re-reads E.M. Forster's A Room with a View, a space where "I don’t feel I have to explain myself, even to myself."

In this essay, Maya Little reflects on what E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View taught her about repetition as a form of change. From Charleston to the River Arno, this essay traces how we build and grow meaning over time.

18/04/2023

Benjamin Khoo re-reads Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, coming to terms with how much he has changed as a reader.

Can a debut bestseller on a geisha’s life inform the trajectory of one’s life? Benjamin J.Q. Khoo rereads his long-forgotten copy of Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha and reminisces on the book he once loved and how much he has changed.

14/04/2023

Nathan Schmidt re-reads C.S. Lewis's The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and reconsiders the traitorous, unlikable Edmund.

Nathan Schmidt rereads The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first book in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, and comes to terms with the ways in which he grew up to become Edmund Pevensie, the book’s notorious doubter, when he always meant to be Lucy. For anyone who may have once suspecte...

13/04/2023

Tim Faught finds Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth as illuminating as ever when he re-reads it as a parent.

Tim Faught takes a look back at The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster and considers how the book informed his experience of living with neurodivergence and what that means for him as a parent.

12/04/2023

Re-reading American Girl’s Body Book for Girls, Liz Schoppelrei grapples with the lacuna in advice for “girls who don’t become women.”

In this personal essay, Liz Schoppelrei reflects on their experience of re-reading American Girl’s The Care and Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls (1998). In revisiting this guide to puberty, they recall moments related to breasts. These memories chart an always unfolding relationship to the ...

11/04/2023

Lynne Stahl re-reads Graeme Base’s Animalia, and discovers an ethos of care in the practice of “reading for the sake of noticing.”

In this essay, Lynne Stahl navigates between childhood memories of Graeme Base’s Animalia and the first weeks of the coronavirus pandemic. Revisiting the alphabet book in COVID’s early days, she considers its impact on her as a child and again in final phone conversations with her father amid hi...

10/04/2023

Re-reading Samuel Beckett’s Molloy makes Ioan Marc Jones buy a dumb phone.

How Samuel Beckett’s Molloy forced Ioan Marc Jones to re-evaluate his life, question his purpose and intelligence, and ultimately buy a dumb phone.

09/04/2023

Sarah Kearns rereads Brinton Turkle’s Do Not Open, and reflects on the book’s role in her effort to “accept the darkness that accompanies the light.”

Inspired by Miss Moody’s beautiful sea glass collection, and terrified of the demon encountered on the beach, Brinton Turkle’s Do Not Open invokes both a sense of beauty and fear for Sarah Kearns. Through textual alterations on behalf of her desperate mother, key morals of the story remained clo...

08/04/2023

We are delighted to announce our special issue on re-reading formative books from our youth!

Featuring essays on Samuel Beckett's Molloy, C.S. Lewis's The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, and more.

Sarah Kearns Sea Glass Shadows One day, knowing how much you love the beach and cats, our mom will find a book that happens... Ioan Marc Jones Two Fools, Among Others It started with Jack Kerouac, unfortunately. I was a performatively masculine seventeen-year-old, like most people reading Kerouac, a...

17/11/2022

For a special issue, The Rambling is inviting essays (1500-2000 words) that document & reflect on your experiences re-reading a favorite or formative book from your youth. Deadline: 2/3/23. So start reading your ♥️ out & send complete drafts to theramblingonline at gmail dot com!

31/10/2022

Anne C. McCarthy on Netflix's Love is Blind and Mary Wollstonecraft

Metadata Snippet: If Mary Wollstonecraft had to come up with a dating show, it might look a lot like Netflix’s Love Is Blind. Anne C. McCarthy reflects on the uncanny resemblance between pod-dating and the madhouse in Wollstonecraft’s unfinished final novel, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman.

28/10/2022

Livia Arndal Woods on pregnancy, close reading, and counting

In “Flashes of Light,” Livia Arndal Woods stitches together small reproductive, pandemic, and professional moments to look for the “weak” methods they demand. Pacing, counting, and close reading, for example, can sometimes help us to catch glimpses of the impossible geography in which our pe...

27/10/2022

Danielle Spratt on How to with John Wilson, Tristram Shandy, and valuing the quotidian

In “The Gravity and Levity of How To with John Wilson,” Danielle Spratt draws on the work of the eighteenth-century writer Laurence Sterne in order to consider how a popular HBO series helps its viewers contend with loss by preserving the most ephemeral incidents and objects.

26/10/2022

A poem by Ryan A. Collins

In this poem, Ryan L Collins explores the correlation between getting a haircut, having money, golf, and funerals while using nostalgia and humor as a coping mechanism.

25/10/2022

Catherine Engh on Richard Powers's latest novel Bewilderment, climate anxiety, and Romantic poetry

Catherine Engh explores the parallels between Richard Powers’s 2021 novel Bewilderment, in which a child struggles with climate anxiety, and Romantic lyric poetry’s narration of the self’s formation through nature.

24/10/2022

Andrew Strombeck on severance, or, the state of work at the end of the world

In this essay, Andrew Strombeck considers how Severance reminds its viewers that the Always-Be-Hustling era masks grim truths about work. As long as we view work as a place to find our best selves, we’re doomed not only to be exploited ourselves but also to facilitate the exploitation of other wor...