William Giraldi

Being an American, Henry James knew, is “a complex fate.”

The exclamation “You’re obsessed,” no matter how it’s uttered, amounts to a layman’s diagnosis or charge, a way of saying something’s wrong with you, and thus a spur to recognition and betterment by the one exclaiming, since the knee-jerk assumption is always that ...

If you want to know what the good Lord thinks of your earthly strivings, you’ll find it in this note to Isaiah 39, in the Geneva Bible: “How greatly God detesteth ambition and vaine glory.” Pretty straightforward. What was a vice for Romans became a sin for Christians. ...

Some writers are destined to have two deaths—the first in life, and the second in memory. The lucky ones can be resurrected from that second death by cultural circumstance and the aid of overseeing angels, irked by injustice, believing these Lazaruses should be helped from ...

Sometime in 2011, before the gestation of my second son, my employer, Boston University, implemented paternity leave for its male professors. A colleague informed me of this news with much envy and astonishment: his four young children had been born before BU joined the ...