George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia

Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, is justifiably praised as the finest political writer in the English language. Few escape high school without encountering one or both of Animal Farm and 1984, his unmatched fictive treatises on the […]

Chris Hedges’ Death of the Liberal Class

I was first exposed to Chris Hedges in high school, by one of the small handful of teachers who have shaped my character and thought. That first assigned book was War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), a partly political, […]

Joshua Cohen’s Four New Messages

Joshua Cohen is the soon-to-be-widely-known author of seven published works, including an 800-page novel and three short story collections. His writings have appeared in Harpers, The New York Times, The London Review of Books and The Paris Review – pretty much every publication or periodical that […]

Camille Paglia’s Sex, Art and American Culture

Camille Paglia defies simple categorization. She is a feminist whose career and popularity has been built on criticizing feminism and a classicist who reveres pop culture and its heroines, particularly Madonna. The blurb appended to my copy of Sex, Art and […]

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden

John Steinbeck was among my first literary loves. Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath and various short stories were early high school encounters, and each of them shook me in its own way. In reviewing my various marginalia, it is easy […]

Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape

For all the controversy it has inspired, Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape has a very simple premise: science can and should provide a framework by which moral and immoral actions, laws and social norms are judged. He begins by asking his reader […]

Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading

In the Preface to Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov preempts his reader by dismissing any similarities between his novel and the works of Franz Kafka, claiming that, at the time of its composition, he had yet to even read Kafka. By […]

Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality

Today, December 15th, 2012, is the one-year anniversary of the death of Christopher Hitchens, and I have finally managed to bring myself to read the series of essays he wrote from his hospital bed detailing his thoughts and experiences as […]

Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Few 20th century writers are as unavoidable and, perhaps, as influential, as Franz Kafka. Born in Prague to a German-speaking Jewish family, Kafka published precious little in his lifetime. Posterity owes a great debt to his friend, Max Brod, who […]

Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran

On the syllabus of a class on Shakespeare I took in university, my professor had written, about Hamlet, that his character “is often taken as the highest representation of the human experience, albeit one that is white, upperclass and male.” Her proviso, […]

Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works

My second foray into the works of Steven Pinker, Harvard professor and cognitive scientist, is his 1997 bestseller How the Mind Works, an ambitious attempt to synthesize competing theories of not only how the mind works – how thoughts and emotions […]

A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems

Alfred Edward Housman, born in England on the 26th of March, 1859, was a classical scholar of the highest calibre and a beloved minor poet. His relatively small poetic output focuses on themes of loss, particularly of life and love, […]

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables has, for some months now, sat on my bedside table, its 1200 page monolithic mass obscuring my alarm clock and thus confronting me, every morning, with the fact that I had not yet read one of history’s most […]

Martin Amis’ Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions

I must begin by giving thanks to my brother, Kenneth, for the gift of this book, my first foray into Amis’ writings; few gifts are better than a well-chosen book, and, for me at least, none more welcome. Visiting Mrs […]

Some Words on John Milton

In the parlance of today’s academic culture, John Milton is not just a “dead white male,” he is the dead white male, epitomizing all of the pejoratives this neologism connotes: his works are archaic, stylistically and syntactically complex, and long and dense […]