I first encountered Thomas Chatterton Williams’ writing three years ago, in the London Review of Books, where he reviewed Ta-Nehisi Coates’ best-selling memoir Between the World and Me with that rare mixture of sympathy and skepticism characteristic of the true critic, and […]
Richard J. Evans’ The Third Reich At War
by on September 29, 2018
The third and final volume in Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans’ monumentally ambitious history of the Third Reich begins with the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 and does not conclude until the fate of the last Nazis – those […]
John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing
by on September 28, 2018
I knew little about John Williams and less about his 1960 novel Butcher’s Crossing when I purchased it, on a whim, at a local bookstore, but my curiosity has been repaid a thousand times over. Ostensibly a western, Butcher’s Crossing […]
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray
by on September 22, 2018
In anticipation of reading Richard Ellmann’s much-acclaimed biography of Oscar Wilde, I have been working my way through his poems and plays, either refreshing my memory or encountering, for the first time, the works that justify his fame. Among the […]
Goethe’s The Sorrows Of Young Werther
by on September 9, 2018
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe achieved international renown in 1774 upon the publication of his first novel, The Sorrows Of Young Werther. It had all the qualities that characterized the later Romantic movement, of which it was an important precursor: strong […]
Richard J. Evans’ The Third Reich In Power
by on August 30, 2018
The second volume of Richard J. Evans’ trilogy of history books covering Nazi Germany, The Third Reich In Power, begins where the first left off, in 1933, with Hitler recently appointed Chancellor of Germany by the aging Hindenburg, and concludes […]
Oscar Wilde’s Selected Plays
by on August 24, 2018
I had not read any Oscar Wilde since high school, and even then my exposure had been limited: a single play, perhaps an essay or two, some of his more famous poems, and of course those glorious, decontextualized epigrams and […]
Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth Of Solitude
by on August 21, 2018
We live in very strange times. Leaders across the developed world can be heard denying that their countries have a unique cultural identity, and the concept of the nation state as a bastion for a specific people to pursue their […]
J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy
by on August 8, 2018
J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy was the surprise bestseller of 2016, largely because it offered a window into a segment of the American population that can justly claim to have been overlooked, even ignored, for the better part of the last two […]
William H. Gass’ Tests Of Time
by on July 31, 2018
William H. Gass died on December 6th of last year, four days before my thirtieth birthday. He was 93 years old. His death didn’t provoke the outpouring of acclaim accompanying the passing of, say, Philip Roth or Tom Wolfe, but […]