Stephen Smith’s La Ruée Vers L’Europe was the talk of Paris upon its publication in France last year, and it is poised to be no less explosive in the English-speaking world after the June release of the English translation, The […]
Paul Auster’s Winter Journal
by on September 10, 2019
Given pages enough, and time, how would you organize the story of your life? Would you begin sensibly, that is to say, chronologically, from infancy into adulthood? Or would you perhaps single out the most impactful moments, the most important […]
Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba The Greek
by on August 31, 2019
One of the oldest of our mythological dichotomies is between the rational, contemplative Apollonian and the sensuous, emotive Dionysian. In literature, the former are more often brooding melancholics, patterned on Prince Hamlet, while the latter are typically depicted as Falstaffian […]
G.K. Chesterton’s In Defense Of Sanity: Selected Essays
by on August 28, 2019
Sanity is today in short supply. The shortage makes itself visible in the men and women we elect to high office, as well as in the media class charged with reporting on them. It’s increasingly visible in our universities, supposed […]
Machado de Assis’ The Wager
by on August 20, 2019
Brazil’s most famous writer, Machado de Assis, languishes in relative obscurity outside his native country, despite the best efforts of estimable champions of his fiction as varied as Susan Sontag, Woody Allen and Harold Bloom. Within Brazil, however, he’s inescapable: […]
Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849
by on August 15, 2019
My introduction to Joseph Frank and his monumental five-volume biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky came more than a decade ago, in a review included in David Foster Wallace’s Consider The Lobster, and the man and his life’s work have been on […]
Don Winslow’s The Power Of The Dog
by on August 5, 2019
This is a book well outside my regular wheelhouse, a best-selling thriller novel, but it came up, again and again, in my readings about the decades-long debacle colloquially known as America’s “border crisis.” Drugs, sex and murder – the stock-in-trade […]
Henry Miller’s Tropic Of Cancer
by on July 31, 2019
Contemplating the fate of Henry Miller’s first published novel, Tropic of Cancer, I can’t help but be amused. It was available in France from 1934 onwards, but British and American readers, constrained by their nations’ obscenity laws, could only read […]
Rick Moody’s Garden State
by on July 28, 2019
Rick Moody’s first novel, Garden State (1992), emerged from his time spent in two spiritual deserts: a mental hospital, where he checked himself in for alcoholism, and northern New Jersey, where he was living at the time. The resulting novel […]
Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles
by on July 25, 2019
The novel that made Thomas Bernhard’s national and international reputation, Gargoyles, offers readers an unbroken montage of human misery and ugliness, both physical and spiritual. Our narrator, a young engineering student, sets out in the very early hours of the […]