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By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who firmly believes that in Middlemarch, no one minds their business, and that’s precisely the point) If you’ve ever thought your town was too nosy, too dramatic, or too obsessed with marriage and mortgages, rest assured: George Eliot did it first and better in Middlemarch. Published in eight volumes between 1871–72

By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who believes that if life is absurd, you may as well squint at the sun and be late to your own trial) Some novels begin with a bang. Others begin with a body. The Stranger begins with a sentence that feels like both and neither: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday,

By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who firmly believes that if your family road trip doesn’t involve a flood, a fire, and a decomposing matriarch, you haven’t truly earned your Faulkner) Welcome to the most dysfunctional funeral procession in American literature. William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) is the kind of novel you read, then reread,

By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who firmly believes that if life is a courtroom, Kafka never gave us the charges—just the echo of footsteps in a never-ending corridor) Once upon a time in the grey, gaslit corners of modernity, a man woke up to find himself arrested. Not cuffed. Not jailed.Just politely, mysteriously, fatally… accused. Of

By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who firmly believes that if repression had a user manual, Victorian men wrote it and then promptly tore it in half by moonlight) Before there were dual SIM phones, there were dual personalities.And before Marvel gave us Hulk-smash and Bruce Banner’s brooding remorse, Robert Louis Stevenson handed us a cautionary tale

By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who firmly believes Florence should be prescribed for all cases of cultural constipation and gender-based claustrophobia) There are novels that arrive like grand trains—majestic, well-scheduled, and heavily metaphorical. And then there’s A Room with a View (1908), which breezes in like a sunbeam through lace curtains, carrying with it the scent

By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who firmly believes that every woman needs a room, a lock, and a polite sign that says “Not now, I’m writing history.”) Before coworking cafes and aesthetically filtered writing retreats… before motivational mugs and #BossLady hashtags… before anyone thought of monetizing silence… there was Virginia Woolf, walking across a cloistered university

By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who firmly believes that giving a bunch of unsupervised British schoolboys a conch and some coconuts is not a social experiment—it’s a horror story waiting for footnotes)   Somewhere in the literary wild, past the pipe-smoking headmasters and the crisply ironed uniforms, lies a novel that dared to ask: What if