Moby Dick
Story Stream
Moby-Dick Is a Novel That Is Mostly About Whales February 26, 2025
According to my records, I read Moby-Dick for the first time in April of 2010. My journey into the book started off quite well. Like most readers, I was surprised by the overt, barely-subtextual homoeroticism—I loved the relationship between Queequeg...
After Melville November 28, 2023
Writing in 2005, Andrew Delbanco observed, in his critical biography Melville: His World and Work, that the author of Moby-Dick “seems to renew himself for each new generation.” Since the mid-twentieth century, Delbanco notes, “there has been a stead...
All Classics Are Funny November 13, 2023
THE MOST FAMOUS OPENING LINE in American literature is also one of the silliest. “Call me Ishmael,” says a New England deckhand. That is a joke. Imagine Good Will Hunting opening with an establishing shot of Matt Damon’s character hammering a nail an...
