Ars Est Mendacium

I’ve been working on this for a while. Not the writing, not exactly, though the words have been circling my notebooks and margins for months, but the thinking. These two books by Joseph Conrad,  Heart of Darkness  and  Lord Jim , have been following me like companions, sometimes silent, sometimes whispering. They are works I can’t seem to shake. I read them years ago, returned to them recently, and found that the older I get, the more they seem to know about me. Conrad wrote them back-to-back at the turn of the twentieth century, but they read like halves of the same question.  Heart of Darkness  looks outward, to empire and its horrors.  Lord Jim  turns inward, to a single man’s shame and longing for redemption. I think Conrad needed the second book because the first hadn’t finished speaking. He diagnosed the sickness of empire; then he wanted to know what that sickness did to a soul. And as I’ve sat with these works, as someone who has lived through ...

Some stories come to us like whispers. They don’t announce themselves with fireworks or marketing blitzes. They arrive quietly, sometimes from unexpected hands, and they linger. In 1987, Scott Turow, an assistant U.S. attorney who wrote in the hours between cases, published  Presumed Innocent . On paper, it was just a debut thriller. In practice, it changed how we imagine the law in fiction, and how we imagine ourselves within it. The premise is straightforward enough. A prosecutor named Rusty Sabich is assigned to investigate the murder of a colleague who also happens to be his former lover. As the case develops, suspicion pivots toward him. Because the novel is told in Rusty’s own voice, the story becomes claustrophobic. You don’t just watch a man being investigated. You inhabit him. His words feel both like an explanation and a plea, sometimes a confession, sometimes a dodge. He speaks, and you are never entirely sure whether to trust him. That uncertainty is what makes the book...

I remember the first time I heard the words  Crescent City . Not from a bookseller or critic, but from a friend who reads the way some people breathe. She said it like a secret. “You haven’t read it? You have to.” I didn’t have to. But I did. Twice, in fact, through the first two books. And by the end, I was left with a question that still lingers: how can something so full...full of pages, of plot twists, of names and histories and warring factions and feel so empty inside? Sarah J. Maas’s series follows Bryce Quinlan, a half-human, half-Fae who begins as a party girl and becomes a reluctant heroine, and Hunt Athalar, a fallen angel with a storm for a past. Around them spins an elaborate city of angels, shifters, witches, and politicians, with murder mysteries, political conspiracies, ancient magic, and an ever-widening web of alliances and betrayals. It is, by any measure, a commercial triumph. First print runs sell out. Bestseller lists bend to make room. Cosplay, fan art, and T...

It begins on Maundy Thursday, the kind of day where the weight of the world doesn’t come all at once but in small, unremarkable pieces. A child wants to wear something impractical. A husband moves too slowly. A wife, already overwhelmed, tries to hold everything together. Abbe Deighton, the wife in question, has a full day ahead and plans for the evening. To make room for it all, she leaves her daughter Cleo with a friend. Not the friend she first thought of, but one close enough. A safe choice, she believes. The kind of everyday compromise parents make constantly. But by nightfall, the road outside that friend’s house is clogged with police, neighbors, and blue lights. Cleo is gone. Some novels teach, some entertain, and some simply sit with you.  Come Sunday , Isla Morley’s first does the last. It does not move with urgency. It does not try to dazzle. It opens a door to grief and leaves it open, inviting you to stand in the doorway and feel the air turn cold. Morley’s writing is ...

There is a staircase in every haunted house, and it never leads anywhere good. But what if the staircase is circular, winding back on itself like a snake swallowing its own secrets? I came across Mary Roberts Rinehart’s  The Circular Staircase  only recently, while working my way through one of those 'Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time' lists, half curiosity, half pilgrimage. What I expected was a dated curiosity, something dusty and overwritten, a historical artifact more than a living work. What I found, instead, was the foundation. Not just of a mystery, but of something stranger and more structurally daring. The blueprint, not for a murder, but for a genre. Published in 1908,  The Circular Staircase  was Mary Roberts Rinehart’s first full-length novel, serialized originally in  All-Story Magazine  before being released in book form by Bobbs-Merrill. It tells the story of Rachel Innes, a sharp-tongued, middle-aged woman who rents a sprawling country home...