Merri, Author at The Pillarist

State of the Site: Year in Review

Brief update on the state of the website and where the plans for The Pillarist lay going forward.

With his second novel, Mishima made landfall in the West. The book is far more about the mask, however, than the confessions.

In his first major work in sixteen years, Cormac McCarthy attempts to reckon the length and breadth of existence in The Passenger.

Evelyn Waugh’s debut novel, Decline and Fall, is not usually considered alongside other works of dystopia. It should be.

Internet anonymity is harder to maintain as censorship gets worse. Will Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter change anything? Probably not!

AI imagery generation has prompted talk of demons and the demonic online. There is more to this topic than a first glance might indicate.

Tolkien’s work has long been the subject of fandom, but this has been a net negative for his literature’s reception and interpretation.

In The Hobbit, Tolkien famously depicts a children’s story about an adventuring English bachelor, but beneath this is a meditation on providence.

With Dobbs, Roe v Wade has been overturned. The legal status of abortion is back in the hands of the states. What does this mean for the future?

Known as probably Tolkien’s darkest work, The Children of Hurin illustrates well the relationship between sin, providence, and tragedy.