Category Archive: fiction

Trying to Be Someone in Irish, Working-Class Brooklyn: Alice McDermott’s Someone

At the end of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, we see Tanya, a jaded gypsy, reflecting on the […]

Dog Days Classics: Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” […]

Using Science Fiction to Teach History (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Distant Future)

I have been reluctant to use fiction in my courses.  This is despite the fact that my own […]

Frankie Fitzgibbons, the Coen Brothers, and the Free Market

Some of them want to use you Some them want to get used by you Some of them […]

Desperate Characters: Best of 2012 Part II

As part of ToM’s Best of 2012 our contributors reflect on books, movies, music, and other pop culture […]

Dog Days Classics: Lanny Budd, Upton Sinclair’s Ideal Idler

“It was profoundly true that movements of the spirit came first, and that events of history were consequences […]

Manic Depressive Gunslingers, Presidential Vampire Slayers, and Emo-Rock Frontiersmen: Refracting History through a 21st Century Lens

When Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter hit the big screen this past summer, some critics hailed it as a […]

Chasing Narrative: Jennifer Egan’s Sometimes Non-Linear Take on Time, Age, and Technology

High school didn’t leave much time for movies.  Maybe that’s not entirely true; movies were there and time […]