Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall was published in late 2009 to great critical acclaim, winning both a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize; its sequel, Bring Up The Bodies, appeared just last year, and it too won the Booker Prize. […]
Hart Crane’s Collected Poems
by on June 29, 2013
Harold Hart Crane was born in 1899 and took his own life, 32 years later, by throwing himself into the Atlantic ocean. We will never know the magnitude of the loss we suffered by his early death, but he is […]
George Saunders’ In Persuasion Nation
by on June 19, 2013
In Persuasion Nation is Saunders’ third published short story collection and my second foray into his works. Originally published in 2006, it collects his short fiction from The New Yorker, Esquire and Harper’s, but, as with CivilWarLand In Bad Decline, there is a unifying theme. In […]
Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels Of Our Nature
by on June 18, 2013
Although I’ve styled this section of my blog “Book Reviews,” I’ve thus far eschewed any kind of rating system, and, with few exceptions, have generally tended to offer unqualified praise to the books I’ve been reading. This is, I hope, […]
George Saunder’s CivilWarLand In Bad Decline
by on June 12, 2013
George Saunders is an unlikely candidate for celebrity, and not merely because he is a writer. Soft-spoken and self-deprecating, dark and humorous all at once, he is a writer of nightmares, worlds peopled with ghosts and mutants that are nonetheless […]
Karl Marx’s Dispatches For The New York Tribune
by on June 4, 2013
Few historical and political figures inspire ire and admiration quite like Karl Marx. While he lived, he was a tireless social critic, exposing the hypocrisies of governments and ministers and shining a light on the glaring social injustices of his […]
Wisława Szymborska’s Poems New And Collected
by on May 31, 2013
I have to begin by thanking my aunt Sandra, both for recommending Wisława Szymborska to me, and for the gifting of this book. Wisława Szymborska (I have given up attempting to pronounce her name) was a Polish poet, born in 1923 […]
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night
by on May 25, 2013
Francis Scott Fitzgerald completed Tender Is The Night in 1934, six years before a heart attack took his life prematurely, to the surprise of no one who was familiar with his drinking habits. It was his last finished novel. His correspondence up […]
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense
by on May 17, 2013
In the history of the written word, few documents have proven more incendiary than Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” Published anonymously in January of 1776, at the very beginning of the American Revolution, Paine’s pamphlet was a call to arms that […]
Alan Turing
by on May 13, 2013
It was learning about Alan Turing’s life and death that inspired me to create this section in recognition of those people who have contributed positively to our advancement as a species without their due of public accolades or historical renown. […]
John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle
by on May 6, 2013
The Wapshot Chronicle was John Cheever’s first published novel and established many of the themes he would become known for: the disconnect between a character’s private and public life, the sense of community fostered by small towns vs. the anomie and […]
William Hazlitt’s Selected Writings
by on May 1, 2013
William Hazlitt was a 19th century political radical, art and theater critic, amateur philosopher and lover of literature. He is also widely considered one of the greatest essayists to ever live, a judgement that jars uncomfortably with the fact that […]
Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater
by on April 26, 2013
Roth has a talent for provocation, amply testified to in his superb and uproarious Portnoy’s Complaint, and honed to devastating effect in Sabbath’s Theater. First, in the interests of intellectual honesty, a caveat: I abhor those critics who cannot honestly confront a […]
Zadie Smith’s On Beauty
by on April 16, 2013
In her collection of essays Changing My Mind, Zadie Smith describes a line delivered by the actress Katharine Hepburn in the movie The Philadelphia Story as being her lodestar for fiction writing: “The time to make up your mind about people is […]
Albert Camus’ The Plague
by on April 12, 2013
Albert Camus’ The Plague is the fictional account of a coastal Algerian town’s battle against a plague epidemic in an unspecified year in the 1940s. There are early warnings of an outbreak – rats surfacing from the sewers to die and numerous […]