Words matter. These are the best Matthew Pearl Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Films have become shorter in length, jumpier in style, and simpler in story so that they can be more easily transferred to once under-exploited international markets.
Porter Square Books was the only place I could find that was dog-friendly, work-friendly, and had food. I was there all the time.
The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time.
As a writer of historical fiction, I believe you don’t want to fictionalize gratuitously; you want the fictional aspects to prod and pressure the history into new and exciting reactions.
My high school English teacher in junior year, Dr. Robert Parsons, assigned us some Poe stories, including ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Purloined Letter.’ Being an animal person, I had trouble with ‘The Black Cat!’ I got hooked instead by ‘The Purloined Letter,’ a Poe story with detective C. Auguste Dupin.
One important idea I hope is reflected in ‘The Poe Shadow’ is that fiction can add as much to history as nonfiction does.
I had a dog named Oliver with severe separation anxiety. He couldn’t be alone… so I had to bring him wherever I went.
Edgar Allan Poe, an earlier UVA student, once complained in a letter that his stepfather spoke to him as if Poe were one of the black slaves; some of the students at UVA surely felt the same about being told what to do by faculty.
What’s most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights.
‘The Dante Club’ was one of America’s most important book clubs, as their Wednesday night meetings ultimately led to our country’s first exposure to Dante’s poetry on a wide scale.
Harvard was also a little bit of a villain in my first book, ‘The Dante Club.’ I guess there might be a way to make Harvard more of a sympathetic presence, but it’s such a powerful institution that it more naturally lends itself toward not necessarily a negative but an obstructionist element in a story.
For several years at the University of Virginia, students had an annual tradition of raising hell around campus, burning tar barrels and shooting pistols into the air.
I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants.
Considering what a prolific writer Dickens was, the word ‘Dickensian’ could legitimately cover a vast thematic territory, explaining at least some of the variety of its applications.
When it comes to referring to Dickens’s life, performing plays with your nine children for friends and family during Christmas is Dickensian.
The intense media coverage of today’s campus shootings presents a double edged sword. On the one hand, it gives us a chance to think about and reflect on the causes; on the other hand, in a very small minority of unstable minds, the repeated telling of the stories can be interpreted as glamorous.
I love writing shorter fiction.
Surprisingly, it was not an American but a British company that opened an amusement park in 2007 called Dickens World, located in the English county of Kent, complete with an Ebenezer Scrooge Haunted House, a Great Expectations Boat Ride and the as-advertised ‘costumed Dickensian characters.’
Poe was plagued and haunted most of all by something pretty banal: poverty. Probably the most eccentric decision in life was to become a writer in an age when making a living at it was nearly impossible.
The book I’m working on next, which will be my fifth, returns to literary history. I really do love literary history, and I have plenty more ideas on it.
