Earlier this week, Cozy Classics appeared on the front page of the Life & Entertainment section of the The Toronto Star. Here’s our response to Linda Cameron, an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, who claimed that our series “won’t help [children] learn to read, move their imaginations or turn them into lovers… Read more →
Category: Musings
English Country Dancing
English country dancing was not, as the name suggests, a rural pastime eschewed by city-dwellers. The term derives from the French “contre-danse”, describing a form of dance which typically began with two longs row of men and women standing opposite each other. A lead couple would prance down the row, with other couples following suit. Dances were often elaborate, involving… Read more →
Top 100 Best First Lines From Novels
When Jack and I began thinking about which two titles to launch Cozy Classics with back in early 2010, we knew we wanted a “girl-friendly” title and a “boy-friendly” title. We also wanted the titles to be popular while still having a certain amount of literary gravitas. Beyond that, it was a wide-open choice. Many worthy candidates were discussed, but… Read more →
From Hugo to Hitchcock
It’s a trite observation that the classics have inspired countless other stories and works of art. The ties that bind the old and the new are many, and recently, I picked up on a little thread involving, of all things, coffins. Read more →
Jane Austen: The Literary Child of Richardson and Fielding
Jane Austen was a fan of two important 18th century novelists, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Richardson was famous for writing epistolary novels—that is, novels told through journals, letters, and other documents—like Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748). Fielding, best known for the novel Tom Jones (1749), satirized Richardson in novels like Shamela (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742). Austen liked the… Read more →
Melville on Motherhood
Moby Dick was first published in 1851. Not exactly the hey-day of involved fathering. Herman Melville’s epic—-with a central plot chronicling Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of the Great White Whale, and numerous meandering asides which painstakingly detail aspects of the whaling industry—-is not where one would expect to find a deft observation by Melville on the delicate subject of breastfeeding.… Read more →