Of all writers, poets have the poorest prospect of earning a living by their work alone. The market for verse is very small, and shrinking, and the patrons of yesteryear – the Roman general, the medieval monarch, the Church – […]
Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands
by on February 24, 2019
Thirty years ago this month, a fanatical cleric in a foreign country openly called for the murder of a British citizen, a humble novelist born in Bombay, for the “crime” of blasphemy. The author was Salman Rushdie, the cleric the […]
Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down
by on February 15, 2019
In the spring of 1993, two years into the Somalian Civil War, the United Nations launched UNOSOM II, a joint venture between the U.N. and the United States military to stabilize the country and deliver much-needed food aid. UNOSOM I, […]
Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes
by on February 9, 2019
Twice now, in the span of as many months, I have been bowled over by a book. The first was John Williams’ Stoner, and the latest is Frederick Exley’s novel-memoir A Fan’s Notes. The two works are united in their […]
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
by on January 27, 2019
An unintentional theme uniting my reading, of late, has been greatness unacknowledged or unappreciated. Leonard Gardner’s Fat City and John Williams’ Stoner deserve far more acclaim than they have won, and certainly more than they knew in the lifetimes of their authors. […]
Lionel Trilling’s Prefaces To The Experience Of Literature
by on January 23, 2019
Of the many great literary critics of the 20th century now dead and unfashionable, I feel the loss of Lionel Trilling most acutely. A consolation: he passed away in 1975, before the universities of the Western world turned against their […]
Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom
by on January 18, 2019
Is freedom to be feared? What a cruel irony it would be, if the centuries-long process of human emancipation – from tyranny, from god, even from privation – resulted not in our ultimate happiness but in our ultimate isolation. How […]
Anthony Burgess’ One Man’s Chorus
by on January 9, 2019
I recently came across Milton’s famous lines, from “Areopagitica,” about a good book being “the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” Neither time nor overly enthusiastic quotation of those […]
Frank Dikötter’s The Cultural Revolution
by on December 31, 2018
Fittingly, the third and final work in historian Frank Dikötter’s trilogy of history books on modern china, The Cultural Revolution, was released exactly 50 years after Mao set the Cultural Revolution in motion, inaugurating a miniature civil war that would […]
John Williams’ Stoner
by on December 30, 2018
How does a literary masterpiece pass into obscurity? Blame the critics, the times, the society that had the good fortune to receive it first but lacked the judgment to cherish and champion it. In hindsight, it’s understandable – though no […]
John McPhee’s Draft No. 4
by on December 28, 2018
I know of no profession more demanding of reassurance than writing. Bricklayers, doctors, taxi drivers and taxidermists do not generally torment themselves about their crafts, or suffer long periods of sterility, or treat a bad day on the job as […]
Jeffrey Burton Russell’s The Devil
by on December 25, 2018
What has the devil done to merit a five-volume biography? If you had asked me just a few years ago, I would have scoffed, but lately I am not so sure. Perhaps the subtitle – Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity […]
Adam Zagajewski’s Another Beauty
by on December 19, 2018
It was a stroke of genius, on behalf of the New Yorker, to run Polish poet’s Adam Zagajewski’s “Try To Praise The Mutilated World” in the week following the collapse of the Twin Towers, when America – and indeed the […]
Cynthia Ozick’s Quarrel & Quandary
by on December 16, 2018
Asked to name America’s best living novelist, the late David Foster Wallace skipped over the usual heavy-hitters – Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and even Thomas Pynchon – in favor of a celebrated but far less widely-read author: Cynthia […]
Richard Pipes’ Communism: A History
by on December 11, 2018
As a young boy, Richard Pipes personally witnessed Adolf Hitler’s victory parade through Warsaw, following the Nazi invasion of Poland. His family – more fortunate by far than most Jewish Poles – fled for the United States shortly after. That […]