The Assassination of the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval

By David C. Hanrahan

Only once has a British Prime Minister been assassinated. Two hundred years ago, on the 11th May 1812, John Bellingham shot dead the Rt. Hon. Spencer Perceval as he entered the House of Commons. David C. Hanrahan tells the story. more

Pseudo-Boccaccio, Yiddish Pulp Fiction, and the Man Who Ripped Off Joyce

By Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti

In 1927, a pair of lurid “translations” appeared in English, marketed as authentic tales by Giovanni Boccaccio and illustrated with supposedly new works by Aubrey Beardsley. Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti search for the origin of these fakes, in which illicit sex begets terrible violence, and uncover a story involving pseudotranslation, Yiddish shund literature, and the piracy king of literary modernism, Samuel Roth. more