Tag: Book

• Sister Carrie (1900), Theodore Dreiser

  

  Sister Carrie is a bizarre book, obsessed with fashion, offering a clash between form and content. Naturalism always revels in a preposterous sense of essentialism and determinism. Case in point: Theodore Dreiser’s heroine has an atavistic instinct for shopping. In fact, the obtrusive narration of Sister Carrie keeps making osten-tedious arguments about women and fashion.…

  E.T.

  August 6, 2026

  Review

  Book, Nineteenth-Century

• The History of Sound (2024), Ben Shattuck

  

  The History of Sound has a sense of the ephemeral and the historical, of continuity and rupture. It creates a present perpetually haunted by unintelligible echoes of the past, siren calls of blighted archives. The stories are spread over some three centuries of New England history, from the colonial era to the recent past, in…

  E.T.

  April 24, 2026

  Review

  Book, Historical fiction, New England