Stephen Smith’s La Ruée Vers L’Europe was the talk of Paris upon its publication in France last year, and it is poised to be no less explosive in the English-speaking world after the June release of the English translation, The […]
Paul Auster’s Winter Journal
by on September 10, 2019
Given pages enough, and time, how would you organize the story of your life? Would you begin sensibly, that is to say, chronologically, from infancy into adulthood? Or would you perhaps single out the most impactful moments, the most important […]
Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba The Greek
by on August 31, 2019
One of the oldest of our mythological dichotomies is between the rational, contemplative Apollonian and the sensuous, emotive Dionysian. In literature, the former are more often brooding melancholics, patterned on Prince Hamlet, while the latter are typically depicted as Falstaffian […]
G.K. Chesterton’s In Defense Of Sanity: Selected Essays
by on August 28, 2019
Sanity is today in short supply. The shortage makes itself visible in the men and women we elect to high office, as well as in the media class charged with reporting on them. It’s increasingly visible in our universities, supposed […]
Machado de Assis’ The Wager
by on August 20, 2019
Brazil’s most famous writer, Machado de Assis, languishes in relative obscurity outside his native country, despite the best efforts of estimable champions of his fiction as varied as Susan Sontag, Woody Allen and Harold Bloom. Within Brazil, however, he’s inescapable: […]
Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849
by on August 15, 2019
My introduction to Joseph Frank and his monumental five-volume biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky came more than a decade ago, in a review included in David Foster Wallace’s Consider The Lobster, and the man and his life’s work have been on […]
Don Winslow’s The Power Of The Dog
by on August 5, 2019
This is a book well outside my regular wheelhouse, a best-selling thriller novel, but it came up, again and again, in my readings about the decades-long debacle colloquially known as America’s “border crisis.” Drugs, sex and murder – the stock-in-trade […]
Henry Miller’s Tropic Of Cancer
by on July 31, 2019
Contemplating the fate of Henry Miller’s first published novel, Tropic of Cancer, I can’t help but be amused. It was available in France from 1934 onwards, but British and American readers, constrained by their nations’ obscenity laws, could only read […]
Rick Moody’s Garden State
by on July 28, 2019
Rick Moody’s first novel, Garden State (1992), emerged from his time spent in two spiritual deserts: a mental hospital, where he checked himself in for alcoholism, and northern New Jersey, where he was living at the time. The resulting novel […]
Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles
by on July 25, 2019
The novel that made Thomas Bernhard’s national and international reputation, Gargoyles, offers readers an unbroken montage of human misery and ugliness, both physical and spiritual. Our narrator, a young engineering student, sets out in the very early hours of the […]
Aldous Huxley’s The Devils Of Loudun
by on July 15, 2019
In August of 1634, a French Catholic priest, Urbain Grandier, was tortured and burned at the stake, accused of ensorcelling an entire convent of Ursuline nuns. Few of the locals, including those who witnessed his body burn, gave much credence […]
John Gardner’s The Art Of Fiction
by on July 11, 2019
The book I am now reviewing, a classic how-to manual for writers, began its life with a much smaller circulation, first among John Gardner’s writing students, and later among a slightly larger community of writers and writing instructors, who affectionately […]
Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
by on July 6, 2019
Yet again, my prejudices have been overturned. I have avoided Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest since high school, after dozens of bland book reports – no doubt more based on the film than the novel – gave […]
Marcel Proust’s Pleasures And Regrets
by on June 29, 2019
Proust is one of the many famous writers more invoked than read (a glance at the 4,200-odd pages of In Search of Lost Time goes a long way to explaining why), and yet somehow he cannot be approached fresh. Noviciates […]
Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families
by on June 27, 2019
Consider, for a moment, the place that the Holocaust occupies in our collective memory. The mere mention of the word conjures in our minds death camps and gas chambers, emaciated corpses and living skeletons starved for food. No single event […]