Every writer and critic I have encountered has voiced a strong opinion – positive or negative – on D.H. Lawrence and his writings. I’m not aware of any author more widely praised and condemned in equal measure, and from both […]
Thomas Ligotti’s Songs Of A Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
by on September 30, 2017
The Penguin Classics publishing house pulled American horror writer Thomas Ligotti from the relative obscurity of genre fiction two years ago, when they re-issued two of his short story collections, Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1986) and Grimscribe (1991), making him one of […]
Jordan Peterson’s Maps Of Meaning
by on September 26, 2017
A little over a year ago, Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology and clinical psychologist, emerged from relative obscurity thanks to a video he posted on his personal YouTube channel, contesting the adoption of Bill C-16 in Canada, which was […]
Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History
by on September 23, 2017
Of the two great totalitarian ideologies that dominated the 20th century and were directly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people, communism has received far less attention and condemnation than fascism. It is still possible to march […]
Tom Sleigh’s Space Walk
by on September 20, 2017
Tom Sleigh is an American poet, playwright, journalist and academic, the recipient of a Guggenheim grant, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a John Updike Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the prestigious Shelley Award from the American […]
David McCullough’s John Adams
by on September 18, 2017
The historian David McCullough, famous for his opinion-shifting biography of Harry Truman, began the book that would become John Adams believing that he would write about both Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and was concerned that such a work would be doomed to […]
Mark Lilla’s The Shipwrecked Mind
by on August 31, 2017
If you wanted to find a modern moment that encapsulated the worst possible political future for the Western world, you could not do better than the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a group of neo-Nazis and white […]
Richard Wright’s Black Boy
by on August 26, 2017
Richard Wright was born in 1908 on a plantation in Mississippi, the grandson of two black Civil War veterans who fought for, and won, their freedom. By 1945, the year of the publication of his memoir Black Boy, the young Southern […]
Mark Lilla’s The Reckless Mind
by on August 24, 2017
In the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise election victory last year, when much of the nation was in a state of shell-shock, a Columbia University professor of history and political philosophy wrote a scathing indictment of contemporary liberalism in, of […]
Gore Vidal’s The Last Empire, Essays 1992-2000
by on August 20, 2017
For more than 50 years, Gore Vidal was the preeminent gadfly of the American left, operating across disciplines: as a novelist, essayist, playwright, actor, screenwriter and politician. Today he is perhaps most famous as a public intellectual whose various debates […]