The twin pleasures of my August involved reading the poetry of Portuguese master Fernando Pessoa in tandem with Richard Zenith’s recently released 900-page biography of the poet. Zenith is the scholar-translator Pessoa deserves, an American now living in Portugal who […]
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Unwitting Street
by on September 2, 2021
My August reading was dominated by two writers who were overlooked in their own lifetimes, and who have recently been resurrected to great acclaim in the English-speaking world. The first of these is Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet whose verses […]
Robert Wuthnow’s The Left Behind
by on August 29, 2021
One of the better books to emerge from the autopsy of the 2016 American presidential election belonged to Princeton’s Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist, Director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion, and the editor of the prestigious […]
Thom Gunn’s Selected Poems
by on August 19, 2021
My introduction to the British poet Thom Gunn (1929-2004) came via Oliver Sacks, whose beautiful memoir On The Move, written shortly before his death, took its title from one of Gunn’s poems. The two men shared much in common: both […]
Michael Dirda’s Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life
by on August 17, 2021
For nearly 50 years, readers of the Washington Post have been privileged to have one of America’s best literary critics as their resident reviewer. Michael Dirda was the deserving victor of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1993, and the […]
Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo
by on August 16, 2021
I’ve recently discovered the hidden places on the Internet where book lovers across the world meet to discuss and share favourite works or argue over the merits of an author or era, and Pedro Páramo, the only novel by Mexican […]
Janet Malcolm’s Forty-One False Starts
by on August 9, 2021
Janet Malcolm passed away a few short months ago, and aside from the handful of New Yorker articles of hers I haphazardly read over the years, she was little more than a name to me. This book was an attempt […]
Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Satan: The Early Christian Tradition
by on August 7, 2021
The second book in religious historian Jeffrey Burton Russell’s five-volume biography of the Devil, aptly titled Satan, picks up where The Devil left off, covering the “early Christian tradition” and its vigorous debates over the nature of God, the devil […]
Osip Mandelstam’s Black Earth
by on August 1, 2021
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who not only lived to witness the collapse of the Soviet Union but played a major role in bringing it about, once observed that, “For a country to have a great writer […] is like having another government. […]
Theodore Dalrymple’s Not With A Bang But A Whimper
by on July 27, 2021
Something I’ve been wondering, of late: did the Romans of the fourth century AD know that their empire was in decline? Certainly there were philosophers and politicians expressing their dismay, but did the average man and woman know that their […]
Augustine Sedgewick’s Coffeeland
by on July 24, 2021
No single product better exemplifies our global world than coffee, produced somewhere and consumed everywhere. Millions of people have come to take their morning cup for granted, incorporating it into their daily lives, relying on its caffeine injection to get […]
Julio Cortázar’s Blow-Up And Other Stories
by on July 19, 2021
The Brussels-born Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar was one of the figureheads of the Latin American Boom, the literary movement that introduced Europe and eventually the English-speaking world to the remarkable talents of South America – Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, Colombia’s […]
James J. Heckman’s Giving Kids A Fair Chance
by on July 13, 2021
There is a very easy and reliable way to measure the sincerity of someone bemoaning “inequality,” one of the most loaded words in modern politics, and that is to assess their focus on early childhood development. Long before two people […]
Robert Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author
by on July 11, 2021
The Austrian author Robert Musil is best known for The Man Without Qualities, a sprawling, 1,700-page opus regularly ranked alongside Ulysses and In Search Of Lost Time among the 20th century’s greatest novels, but it remained incomplete until his death […]
James Burnham’s Suicide Of The West
by on July 7, 2021
James Burnham passed away in 1987, the year I was born, but he’s experiencing a second life as his writings – many previously out of print – are finding new favor among the growing dissident Right, not only in America but […]