Matthew Pearl

For several years at the University of Virginia, students had an annual tradition of raising hell around campus, burning tar barrels and shooting pistols into the air.

When it comes to referring to Dickens's life, performing plays with your nine children for friends and family during Christmas is Dickensian.

The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time.

I don't like my birthday. I don't like things that are directed towards me. It took me a long time to get over people asking me to write my name in the book.

As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens's era will be recreated in some way.

When Dickens arrives in the United States in November of 1867, he's already in questionable health. So by the end of the trip, he was really in failing condition, and really, he would never recover completely after this point, and you could sort of draw a straight line to his ultimate decline and death.

Films have become shorter in length, jumpier in style, and simpler in story so that they can be more easily transferred to once under-exploited international markets.

Up until the final decade of the nineteenth century, the United States and the United Kingdom did not recognize copyright in each other's creative works.

Porter Square Books was the only place I could find that was dog-friendly, work-friendly, and had food. I was there all the time.

The intense media coverage of today's campus shootings presents a double edged sword. On the one hand, it gives us a chance to think about and reflect on the causes; on the other hand, in a very small minority of unstable minds, the repeated telling of the stories can be interpreted as glamorous.

Dickens's final book, 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood,' forms the jumping-off point for my new novel, 'The Last Dickens'. This last work by Dickens has very little social commentary and a pretty tightly efficient storyline and cast of characters. Not necessarily what we think of when we think what characterizes Dickens.