I have known for some time that the works of Derek Raymond (real name Robert William Arthur Cook) are difficult to come by, but only now, after completing the fourth book in his celebrated Factory quintet, have I perhaps understood […]
Graeme Wood’s The Way Of The Strangers
by on November 18, 2020
In the short interim between my completion of Graeme Wood’s The Way Of The Strangers, one journalist’s account of his encounters with ISIS members and sympathizers and the belief system that informs their worldview, and my beginning this blog post, […]
Irvin D. Yalom’s Becoming Myself
by on November 7, 2020
I can’t now recall what made me reach for Irvin Yalom’s memoir. I had never heard of him, prior to picking up this book, so it wasn’t his sterling reputation as a professor and practitioner of psychiatry, or his successful […]
Paul Fussell’s Class
by on October 24, 2020
My entirely accidental discovery of the late Paul Fussell was one of the high points of October, and his 1983 book Class: A Guide Through the American Class System kept me in good humour through what was an otherwise cold […]
Janice Fiamengo’s Sons Of Feminism
by on October 20, 2020
My introduction to Janice Fiamengo came seven years ago, when she gave a presentation at the University of Toronto entitled “What’s Wrong With Women’s Studies?” The presentation itself was delayed, owing to the efforts of the usual cabal of rabble-rousing […]
Christopher Lasch’s Women And The Common Life
by on October 17, 2020
According to his daughter, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, who helped assemble and introduce this collection of Christopher Lasch’s essays, the impetus for their writing came from reading both Jean-Jacques Rousseau and François Poullain de la Barre – two writers famous for this […]
Yukio Mishima’s Life For Sale
by on October 15, 2020
Motivated, no doubt, by Mishima’s rapidly ascending reputation in the West, publishers in Britain and the United States have finally translated his 1968 novel Life For Sale, bringing it to English-speaking audiences for the first time. It is just the […]
William Giraldi’s Hold The Dark
by on October 6, 2020
William Giraldi’s debut novel, Busy Monsters, was one of the first books I reviewed on this blog, more than seven years ago now. It was a bold and inventive comedy, emblematic of the mind behind it, and I doubt I […]
Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises
by on September 30, 2020
It was Gertrude Stein who coined the famous phrase “lost generation” to describe the unlucky men and women who came of age during the cataclysm of the First World War, but it was Hemingway who made it famous, using it […]
Peter Moskos’ Cop In The Hood
by on September 26, 2020
HBO’s police procedural drama The Wire made the Baltimore drug trade – and the incredible crime and violence it creates – familiar to American television watchers, but in roughly the same time period that the show was taking place, a young […]
Derek Raymond’s How The Dead Live
by on September 24, 2020
Derek Raymond’s Factory series has the grim allure of a corpse. No matter how many times I turn the final page of one of these books, eager to escape the blight and despair of England’s criminal underworld in the 1980s, […]
Edmund Wilson’s The Triple Thinkers
by on September 22, 2020
Edmund Wilson has fallen into relative obscurity at the moment, but for much of the 20th century he was America’s preeminent literary critic – and that at a time when literary criticism still had some purchase on the cultural mainstream. […]
Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871
by on September 20, 2020
With this fourth book in Joseph Frank’s five-volume biography of Dostoevsky, we approach the apex of Dostoevsky’s career as a writer, for in the five-year period between 1865 and 1871, he will write three masterpieces in rapid succession: Crime and […]
William Julius Wilson’s When Work Disappears
by on September 9, 2020
William Julius Wilson is a professor of sociology at Harvard University (formerly of the University of Chicago), a one-time President of the American Sociological Association, the author of a number of hugely influential books on race and urban poverty, and […]
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime And Punishment
by on September 5, 2020
I see by the inscription inside my copy that it has been nearly ten years to the month since my last reading of Crime And Punishment. I perfectly remember where I was when I first sat down to read it, […]