J.K. Rowling’s commencement speech at Harvard in 2008. Honest and inspiring. 

http://qwiklit.com/2013/04/16/25-rare-photos-of-famous-authors/

Criticism that the classic doomed love story glorifies immaturity misses the point: Shakespeare was riffing on how people use the young/old binary to manipulate others.

The point of the play isn’t the exhilaration or the dunderheadedness of young love. Rather, the point is the language itself: the dazzling, disturbing rhetorical force of old/young, corrupt/innocent, experienced/naïve.

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, unless the family consists of a morally depraved patriarch and three highly differentiated siblings who, after years out of contact with each other, convene at the family home for a slowly escalating mess made inevitable by their respective and collective dysfunctions, in which case that family is unhappy in the same way as the Karamazovs.

If the same family is subjected to a criminal prosecution after being set up by a conniving quasi-sibling, if the brothers keep trying to mooch money off the family, and if the eldest brother is brash, the middle one smart, and the youngest one saintly, then we have to consider the possibility that this family actually is the Karamazovs, even if they call themselves the Bluths and they appear in an early 2000s Fox sitcom and not a nineteenth-century Russian novel. In which case Mitch Hurwitz (who has a degree in theology from Georgetown) is Dostoevsky. That’s probably the most farfetched parallel in this comparison. The rest are uncanny.

A fun read and plausible comparison, certainly!

An Excellent conceited Tragedie…

Title page of the first edition.