Bruno Schulz’s The Street Of Crocodiles & Other Stories

In 1942, after German troops invaded the Polish town of Drohobycz, a middle-aged Jewish man, a teacher and amateur painter who had survived the occupation by exchanging his skills as a muralist for protection from a local Gestapo officer, was walking home […]

Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside

Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy could scarcely have asked for better timing for the publication of her true-crime book Ghettoside, released in early 2015, immediately following a year of high-publicity inner city crimes, cop killings and racial tensions escalating into riots […]

Liu Xiaobo’s No Enemies, No Hatred

The 2010 Nobel Peace Price was awarded, in absentia, to Chinese writer and social critic Liu Xiaobo. He could not attend the award ceremony in Oslo, however, because he was serving his fourth prison term in China, this time for […]

Max Beerbohm’s The Prince Of Minor Writers

At the end of his tenure as drama critic of The Saturday Review, George Bernard Shaw took it upon himself to name his successor, and after a string of interviews he lit upon Max Beerbohm, sealing his approval with a […]

Jack Gilbert’s Collected Poems

With the passing of Seamus Heaney in 2013, I lost the only contemporary poet who has ever meant anything to me, whose writings have had any claim on my heart and mind. And when I read, for example, Joseph Epstein’s […]

Bernard Lewis’ The Middle East

Approaching his centenary, historian and Princeton professor Bernard Lewis remains one of the world’s foremost scholars of the Middle East and its history from antiquity to the present; he is the author of dozens of books on the region, covering its […]

Michael Chabon’s Werewolves In Their Youth

Michael Chabon lived many an aspiring fiction writer’s dream, shooting to prominence when one of his professors at UC Irvine, recognizing his gifts, sent his master’s thesis to a local agent, who secured Chabon a sizeable advance for what would become […]

Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist

Matt Ridley wears many hats. He is a former bank chairman, a member of both Britain’s House of Lords and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a journalist and the bestselling author of several science books dealing specifically with human biology. […]

William H. Gass’ Life Sentences

A blank page is a maddening thing, offering at once the promise of possibility and the torment of finality, for every printed word is a commitment curtailing choice, a brick laid in the foundations of a building whose plan we only […]

Niall Ferguson’s Colossus

I was thirteen when the Towers fell. Math class was cancelled. Instead of doing algebra, we sat huddled on the classroom floor, watching the destruction on a small screen, too uncomprehending to feel real fear, but old enough, still, to […]

Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice & Other Stories

Of the many prohibitions handed down to writers like commandments from an invisible god, one of the silliest and longest-abiding urges aspiring authors not to write about writing or cast a writer as protagonist. It is a silly interdiction, both because it is […]

Martin Amis’ Experience

In 1994, Frederick and Rosemary West were charged with the abduction and murder of ten young women. The details of their horrific crimes are shocking, and continue to captivate Britain and the world, as the lurid and macabre are wont […]

Christopher Isherwood’s Mr. Norris Changes Trains

On a train from the Netherlands to Berlin, some time in the 1930s, William Bradshaw, an English expatriate (named, rather transparently, for his author, Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood) encounters Arthur Norris, an eccentric whose personality provides the novel’s driving force. […]

E.M. Cioran’s Anathemas And Admirations

Emil Cioran, the Romanian-born French philosopher who lived his life perpetually on the verge of suicide, seems perhaps an odd choice for a consoling figure, but that is exactly what he has become to me. The man who “provoked existence to […]

James Wood’s The Broken Estate

In my previous posting on Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, I spoke, perhaps dramatically, of the battle for the soul of Western culture, one that has already long been lost in academia. University English departments have stripped literature of its special […]