Raise your hand if you slogged through The Scarlet Letter in high school. I distinctly remember how much hate this book elicited from my 11th-grade English class. Secretly though, I kind of loved Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale of sin, hypocrisy and guilt among the Puritans. Still, I never returned to Hawthorne until just now, when I decided to read The Marble Faun, his final completed novel. The book centers on a group of young expatriate artists in 19th-century Rome who become e

Ernest Hemingway famously used the term "the iceberg theory" to describe his writing technique, in which only a small part of his meaning is visible, and the rest is submerged. Reading his work today, it's easy to forget how experimental his approach was at the time. I underlined the following passage because I think it encapsulates Hemingway's mastery of understatement, as well as his flair for pointing out the absurd in subtle ways. This paragraph appears toward the end of

In 1926, Ernest Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises, his first novel. To mark its 100th anniversary, it felt fitting to re-read the book and to reflect on why I think it's an American masterpiece. The first time I encountered this book was in my AP English class in high school. I was instantly hooked on Hemingway's style and his Prohibition-era tale of American and British expats behaving badly as they gallivanted through Europe. At the same time, I didn't really get a lot