You Are Not Alone Across Time

Using Sophocles to treat PTSD

The Untamed

Joshua Ferris’s restless-novel syndrome

Weekend Read: The Last Post

No, by The Last Post, I’m not suggesting, over this first weekend of May, that you curl up with Ford Madox Ford’s novel of that name; rather, I mean to…

A Certain, Wandering Light

“What is the hardest task in the world?” The question is Emerson’s, in his essay, “Intellect.” His answer? To think. I would put myself in the attitude to look in…

It’s Very Childlike

What is literary criticism for? The question came up years ago as the subject of a London Review of Books 25th anniversary forum that included Terry Eagleton, Frank Kermode, Zadie…

Weekend Read: «Cliquez ici pour visualiser le séquence!»

I’ve been unabashedly ludditic this week, arguing for (or, at least, expressing a love of) the handmade book. Just to reassure you that I’m every bit the modern guy, I…

Currents from the Moor

If the illustrated book for adults can, when the illustrations are undertaken by a hand less sophisticated than those of the author, produce an effect on the reader of distrust…

Woefully Too Small

Writers labor to make the visual world visible in fiction. There are many ways to do it. Here’s how William Makepeace Thackeray, age 33, made us see the world, in…

Weekend Read: “Sure as the stars return again”

A friend called the other day from a bench in New York’s Hudson Valley to report that the weather was, at last, perfect for reading outside. As his first book…

Our Idleness, Pride, and Folly

TAX An impost; a tribute imposed; an excise; a tallage. Charge; censure. To TAX To load with imposts. To charge; to censure; to accuse. —A Dictionary of the English Language,…

Lodged Within the Heart

A great sense of occasion is present when a friend publishes a book, but there’s a particular pulse of pleasure I’m getting from the arrival of Erik Reece’s An American…

Weekend Read: Frederick Seidel, “A Poet of Great Innocence”

Every day in America, on public radio stations across the land, a short program airs called “The Writer’s Almanac.” Hosted by the writer, musician and impresario Garrison Keillor, the show’s…

My Book is a Painting

Readers familiar with Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, Lectures on Russian Literature, and Lectures on Don Quixote, know that Nabokov had a very vivid way of reading the texts that he…

Tricks of Demeanor and Speech

“How one pines for a translation of Proust by the hand of Nabokov,” wrote Christopher Hitchens a few years ago in a review of Lydia Davis’s translation of Swann’s Way.…

Weekend Read: “He wanted the overtones as well”

This week, I’ve posted around the uncontroversial contention that literary criticism is nothing if it isn’t reading closely, quoting abundantly, and parsing carefully. In the course of commenting on such…

The Evil Thoughts of Man

Monday, I mentioned close reading as a practice indivisible from literary criticism. The thought was sparked by a letter I’d just received in response to an essay of mine in…

Another Sensibility

Though it’s amazing to imagine, there are some people who are against close reading in literary criticism. A friend who attended a panel on long-form book reviewing recently reported that…

Weekend Read: “What went wrong in Germany”

Jonathan Littell’s second novel, The Kindly Ones, has gotten a good deal of attention. There has been no shortage of reviews, from which composite one can glean a picture of…

Similar Incapacities

Above you’ll see the prettiest of gatefold title pages of one of the most useful (out of print) books I know, The Craft and Context of Translation. As the fine…

“Grammar and Style!”

Some of my favorite passages of English prose appear in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. Written in French and translated into English by Beckett and Patrick Bowles, the novel’s language is, to…

Weekend Read: “Frenzy finds its weapons”

There is no translation of any worthwhile book that hasn’t had its sometimes vigorous detractors. Jerome, who gave us the Vulgate, was forced to flee Rome to finish his work…

Remote in Time, or Alien in Language

I’m inhabiting a pleasant little temporal interim right now, the lucky space that opens up when a new Bob Dylan record is announced. Dylan’s readers (more upon that apparently errant…

The Forces of Conservatism and Obstruction

In a long letter from T.S. Eliot to John Quinn, dated July 9, 1919, one finds the following: I am sorry to say that I have found it uphill and…

Weekend Read: “Whatever hole contains forever”

Zadie Smith certainly doesn’t need a great deal of critical subsidy. Her novels are bought and read in tremendous volume, and she is regularly looked to to hold forth critically…

Hinged Mostly on Dedications

This sentence caught my eye in yesterday’s International Herald Tribune: Wells said that compared with the Cobbe portrait, the other representations now thought to be copies of it presented “an…

Odd Bits of Wire That Came to Hand

One of the more charming books I’ve come across recently is pictured at left. I suppose Home-Made (Fuel Publishing) would qualify as a coffee-table book (if your coffee-table is about…

Weekend Read: Three Kings

In my previous post, a few notes on D.T. Max’s piece on David Foster Wallace in the current New Yorker, I floated some preliminary ideas as to where the title…

The Voice of Days of Old and Days to Be

I would have to think that there isn’t a writer who, by now, hasn’t read D.T. Max’s piece on David Foster Wallace in the current issue of the New Yorker.…

See also: SIAMESE TWINS

Many years ago, I came upon a little book called The Misspeller’s Guide. It listed, alphabetically, commonly misspelled words, under the principle that if one only knew how to misspell…

Weekend Read: “The upside-down carcass of a wolf”

There are many ways that one can complain about the state of the world of letters. The quantitative approach charts the reduction in sales of “serious literature,” and further bolsters…

The Same Line of Inquiry

Much in the way that the glint off the snow where I am can seem, some days, like (forgive me) a miracle, being able to read, in the comfort of…

Have Another Biscuit With Your Tea

Last night was the annual American devotional exercise to the excesses of second-class storytelling. I didn’t watch, so won’t bag on the particulars, much less the idea of such a…

A Quiet Pealing of Bells

I haven’t read much by Russian Booker Prize-winner Ludmila Ulitskaya, but it seems I’ve been remiss. A friend sent me this paragraph from “Sonechka,” translated by Arch Tait: And there…

Beings, Things, Landscapes

“It was the day Michel Leiris died,” is the first sentence of Grégoire Bouillier’s second book, L’Invité mystère, finely translated as The Mystery Guest (MacMillan) by Lorin Stein. I had…

A Timeless Story, Beautifully Told

Dear Mr. Mason, As an avid reader of literature and an aspiring writer, I would like to think that I have a decent grasp of the elements that are common…

Holiday Weekend Double-barrel Weekend Read: “The skies of Genesis are watery,” & “I still liked to think of myself as approachable”

I should confess straightaway to an unseemly feeling of delight today, brought on by the wonders of the wonderful Web. This week’s posts on a sentence by the talented Joseph…

Stars to Wish On

In my most recent post, I shared an exchange with a novelist friend about the work of the novelist Joseph O’Neill. When we left off, my friend wondered what I…

Netherland; or, the Fishy Artificial Starfish

A novelist friend (who has asked to remain anonymous), having heard all the encouraging words here and elsewhere about Joseph O’Neill’s third novel, Netherland, started to read it a few…

Weekend Read: “Killed in the Chase”

A few weeks ago on a Sunday I was driving across Vermont in a snowstorm and passed a used–pardon me, antiquarian–bookstore. That latter designation, of course, indicates danger: it means…

Updike the Critic

John Updike gave us a great many ways to be grateful. He embraced forms (novel, story, poem, essay, play) polyamorously, and then within each of these offered variations aplenty. His…

From Heel to Throat

I wonder how many schools in America make the memorization of poetry a part of their curriculum these days. Do students still encounter the teacher who forces the class to…

Weekend Read: “She is eager to trace for you”

Many pundits have been parsing the policy implications of our new president’s inaugural address. Implications interest me less than articulations, and so naturally I’ve been diverted by the rhetorical rather…

Love Exists, Love Exists

I have translated some poetry into English, and have felt fully the rather inevitable disappointment of rendering a line of limpid beauty into my own clunky music. One tries, and…

Ratyfeit and Found Gude

It occured to me this morning that tomorrow’s key word, “inauguration,” might merit scrutiny. Noah Webster’s 1828 Dictionary gives a typically terrific definition (of the verb): INAUG’URATE, v.t. [supra.] To…

The Gates of Forgetfulness

“Just what I tasted, did, smelled, saw, and heard, not to mention touched, between ten thirty and the completion of the evening meal,” writes E.E. Cummings in The Enormous Room,…

Perfectly Different

“With the reader’s permission I beg, at this point of my narrative, to indulge in one or two extrinsic observations.” I find that request irresistible–not because I’ve come to know…

The Vulgar American Idiom

As the new year began (and following a year-ending week of memoir-bashing), I offered a short list of memoirs for which I maintain unreserved admiration. Alas, in the intervening days,…

A Little Stroke of Luck

Yesterday’s mail brought the beautiful little book whose cover you see, with its sketch by P. Picasso of the wounded author–1,266 pages of Guillaume Apollinaire’s complete poems. The edition in…

Language, Behavior, History

Imaginative literature traffics in selves. The statement can be read variously. The selves can be the creatures in the writing—narrators and characters who present or appear in a novel or…

New Year’s Read: A Whole Variegated Chorus of Yells

With all the dark talk this week about the falsity and mediocrity of memoir, it seems only fair to celebrate three bright examples of memoir at its best. Neither of…

A False Story: Six Questions for Ken Waltzer

In my previous post, I discussed Herman Rosenblat’s memoir An Angel at the Fence, which was revealed over the weekend as a deception. The discovery and exposure of that deceit…

Animated Treacle

“I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people,” Herman Rosenblat is quoted as saying in yesterday’s New York…

Holiday Treats: Distant machine-gun rattle

In 1997, I sent Guy Davenport a cassette of some cool recordings. Most of them he’d already heard. Pound, Eliot, Yeats and others, reading their poetry. One he’d not heard,…

Weekend Read: “Quinsy, croup, and the irresistible temptation of diving from the piers”

Harper’s readers know that Daniel Philippe Mason (no relation) has been writing excellent, strange, and beautiful stories for this magazine over the past few years. Three have appeared so far,…

And the Rivers and the Lonely Roads

There are many ways of explaining the sudden, stratospheric popularity of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. At his essence he was a writer who was always thinking of new ways to…

Disastrous Fictions

The hum you hear in the background is a propane generator giving me just enough juice to charge a laptop and brew some coffee–day four in life without power in…

Weekend Read: “The Banquet Years all over again”

Wyatt Mason is iced-in in New England, without power or Internet access, and transmits this week’s Weekend Read by telephone. “I propose an essay on Roger Shattuck written by Jed…

OurSpace

For those who read books as part of their habit of being, end of the year “Best Books” lists tend to offer little in the way of surprises. Odds are,…

Effort Into Function

A friend of mine is a bartender, and I hadn’t seen him for a while, until last week. It’s fun to watch him bring over two decades of experience to…

Flailing at Williams

Unlike painting, sculpture, dance, drama and music criticism, literary criticism is produced in the same medium as the one to which it responds. This is a complicating advantage: “complicating” because…

The Bigger Mustache

Most films are instantly forgotten. I don’t mean this in the gently figurative sense—that most films are not remembered. I mean that most films, in their onrush of vague and…

Powers of Empathy

“It’s beyond my skills as a writer to capture that day,” begins a sentence that stopped me this weekend and made me break into a very earnest smile. And then…

Bismarck’s dream

Admirables Poetas Troyanos

In 1993, I lived in a small Italian town for a winter. Expanding to a population of 350,000 German tourists during the summer, the town contracted back to 1500 rich…

Knowingly and Winkingly

In the six months or so that I’ve had this little column, I’ve been surprised and pleased by all the mail. Very little of it is anything less than spirited,…

Weekend Read: “The work that gave me trouble inspires a kind of grudge in me”

This week, I’ve been reading essays by French Writer Henry de Montherlant. I admit to a comprehensive ignorance of his body of work, but find the collection into which I’ve…

Girded Loins

“Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast…

Trivialities Difficult to Surpass

“The frequent references to Max Brod, Prague, insomnia, headache, have not been included in the Index.” So runs the inadvertently hilarious advisory sentence to the index of I Am a…

Weekend Read: “On the profound fatuity of twenty-first-century bourgeois existence”

By one catastrophically limited measure, the best novel of the year is surely Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland—best in that it has generated the most intelligent critical disagreement this year on what…

Maybe We Should Just Change It All

“All writing is rewriting,” runs the annoying adage. Annoying because all adages, in their hectoring certainty, feel like sharp pokes in the ear. And annoying squared because, as anyone who’s…

Harrumph of the Month

Dear Common Reader, The jig is up. My critical stance has been revealed, at last, as mere pose, and it is time that I confess. I owe you so little;…

Weekend Read: “He is in angry mourning for the millions of books gone forever”

As readers learned yesterday, eminent critic and longtime friend of Harper’s Magazine John Leonard died Wednesday. His most recent bio in the New York Review of Books described him this…

Fundamentalism

Yesterday afternoon, behind the stripes and holding my polling place’s already blunted pencil, I voted in the presidential election. I wrote, in a steady hand, a blue streak of ×’s,…

United Voice of Persons in Publick Prayer

VOTE, n. [L. votum, from voveo, to vow. Votum is properly wish or will.] Suffrage; the expression of a wish, desire, will, preference or choice, in regard to any measure…

Weekend Read: Happy Hohnukkah!

Donovan Hohn, an erstwhile editor at this magazine (and current contributing editor), has been writing terrific essays for Harper’s and others for a number of years. He has a lyrical…

Simulated Ignorance

Recently, a friend received a novel as a gift. “You must read this book!” the giver said. My friend read the book. Her report to me: Wow, what a bad…

Muted, Undone, Overcome

“Finally, in the autumn of 1987” writes W.G. Sebald in The Rings of Saturn, “a hurricane such as no one had ever experienced before passed over the land.” Sebald describes…

Weekend Read: “Better Mendacities”

Certain times, these times, often leave me wondering, late of an afternoon, what certain artists long dead might have been prompted to say about them. Although good guy Bruce Springsteen,…

Less Reprehensible Regions of Conspicuous Consumption

If it were your ambition to convince a friend that her deeply held belief, cherished since childhood—say, that apple cider is undrinkable, undigestible, and unbearable—is dangerously off the mark, you…

Little Men in Themselves

“A lexicographer has godlike powers,” wrote Guy Davenport in an an essay on America’s last and greatest such household deity, Noah Webster (1758-1843). Lexicographers, Davenport continued: can, like Johnson, define…

Wyatt Mason is Reading…

…and will return next week.

Weekend Read: “Safety, peace, and prosperity”

The stunt book–wherein our author undertakes an activity of dubious or dangerous oddity and emerges, huzzah, with an inspiring tale of unlikely trancendence–has its risks. It is one thing to…

Blowin’ Up!

No one would think to begrudge the grower of a prize-winning pumpkin tipping the scales at a country fair. Pity, though, the poor writer saddled with similar, heavyweight fortune. With…

Weekend Read: “Whether I was more a loser or gainer”

I was pleased to read Adam Gopnik’s report this week on Richard Reeves’s new biography, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (Overlook). Mill (1806-1873), writer of On Liberty and The Subjection…

He Pretended to Be Deaf and Dumb

“The things I’ve seen in Antwerp are not to be described,” Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916), né Rabinovich, writes in his novel Motl, the Cantor’s Son. Aleichem wrote in Yiddish, and the…

A Patter of Quick Steps

In a 1996 letter Guy Davenport offered me the following fact, following it with a snippet of on-the-fly fiction: In my previous post, mentioning Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards!–a screed…

Weekend Read: Fire the Bastards!

“The worst review is no review. Blackest marks go to Harper’s, New Leader, New Republic, Booklist, a few newspapers & most of the quarterlies (they were busy measuring Henry James’s…

I AM SCREAMING! AAAAAAA!

Some people are fussy about their books, insisting that the margins within remain pristine, treating each volume as a sacred object. Although I have a fair number of first editions,…

An Object of That Desire

Here’s a clause that put me on orange alert last week: “but in the end this little novel possesses neither the ambition nor the scope of the author’s big postwar…

Weekend Read: “We become less alone inside”

In the week since his death, the web has been full of remembrances of David Foster Wallace, tributes both to the person and to his work. Among the most substantive…

Pushing Slightly Against the Skin of his World

There’s a short story in John Haskell’s collection I Am Not Jackson Pollock (FSG 2003) called “Glenn Gould in Six Parts.” The story’s ambition seems to be to look at,…

Weekend Read: “Nature Seems to Exist for the Excellent”

“It is natural to believe in great men,” begins Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Representative Men: Seven Lectures. After the past twenty-four hours of reassuringly well-lit conversations between Charlie Gibson and the…

Our Blunted Rhetorical Daggers

“Why is civility so essential? Is negativity not one of the conditions of criticism?” The questions come late in “Against Integrity,” Leon Wieseltier’s latest Washington Diarist column from this fortnight’s…

An Alien Door

“Even before the knocker was lifted, he knew they had come: here were the wheels of the trap scraping on gravel, and the pony’s skipping gait, and a child’s angry…

Weekend Read: Bearing Down on the Banks

At the Republican convention the city of New Orleans and the larger gulf coast received what was doubtless a salubrious and meaningful supply of fortifying lip service. One might suppose…

Unconsumed Holes

“But can a novelist, or any writer for that matter, really notice too much or dwell too much on what he notices?” The question was posed a few weeks back…

Weekend Listen: Hallali!

Last week, Arthur Krystal suggested in our discussion that contemporary culture now suffers from a dearth of great art. Krystal quoted Eliot’s statement about Yeats—“He was one of those whose…

An Abnormal, Morbid, or Disfiguring Outgrowth

“The westerly excrescence of the continent of Asia, which we call Europe, came to dominate the world during the course of the second millennium AD.” This sentence begins a book…

On a Very High Shelf

Last weekend, Die Zeit published scans of four notecards from the 138-notecard-manuscript of Vladimir Nabokov’s final, unfinished work, The Original of Laura. Composing on notecards allowed Nabokov to set down…

Weekend Read: “Not a bad way of making a living”

This week on Sentences I’ve shared my enthusiasm for the essay generally and for those by Arthur Krystal specifically. Reading Krystal on on beauty, sin, typewriters, laziness, death, duelling or…

The Books Remain Closed: A discussion with Arthur Krystal

In my previous post, I talked about the essay as a form, as a showcase both of thinking and for thinking, for exploring a subject in all of its contradictory…

Weekend Read: “May Christ send you sorrow and a serious illness”

In these pages, in 1947, Jacques Barzun reviewed Malcolm Lowry’s novel, Under the Volcano. Barzun’s review, a terse paragraph in a long essay that bundled many books together with the…

Prayers Mistakenly Submitted

I have been spending some time lately with the Michael A. Lofaro Edition of James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family. The Lofaro was published earlier this year by…

“Shurshaschie in Buryane”

Here’s a sentence that stopped me this weekend: For a moment he seemed to be in control of the whirlpool that had seized hold of him; then a thick black…

Weekend Read: An unwritten, half written, rewritten difficult book

Two months ago, I wrote about the news of Dmitri Nabokov having announced, after protracted hemming and internationally reported hawing, that he intended to publish his father Vladimir’s final, unfinished…

All That, For This?

A book I read this past weekend, not John Haskell’s American Purgatorio about which I wrote in my previous post, but one that comes out in the fall, was a…

Die A Painful Death

Enthusiasm is suspicious. Or so a critic sometimes feels. Ruth Franklin, writing in the New Republic a few years ago about David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, expressed some discomfort over…

Weekend Read: “So the trail leads you here”

In my previous post, I touched upon the habit of rereading, suggesting that it’s a central feature of all reading experience. To mint a crude means of measuring literary quality,…

An Imaginary Kindle

As reading is said to be dying, at least by our latest and most trusted oracles, rereading must not be dying but surely should be, by now, dead. And yet,…

This Incomprehensible Whatever-it-was

Philip Roth has an essay at the back of the paperback of Portnoy’s Complaint about how the first lines of his novels came to him. It’s a nice example of…

Weekend Read: “The queer world of verbal transmigration”

This week, I’ve touched on the matter of translation, a subject that rouses the interest and ire of anyone who invests in books, whether reader or writer. ‘Bad translation’ is,…

“An Uncharacteristically Altruistic Monument”

In my previous post, I discuss Adam Thirlwell‘s new book, The Delighted States: A book of novels, romances, & their unknown translators, containing ten languages, set on four continents, &…

The Discharge From a Deeper Wound

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” I wrote a few years ago, “everyone hates translations. The evidence is everywhere in the history of literature:” Cervantes wrote that reading a translation was “like…

Weekend Read: “The other side”

It’s always exciting when a novel by a writer of whom one hasn’t heard appears and is said to be terrific. Receiving the news, we readers are granted a few…

Resurrection Is Rare

If pressed to offer an account of oneself in prose, how might one best go about presenting not merely a coherent personal narrative but an insightful one? And going further…

“Written Rather Desultorily”

Liesl Schillinger, in a review this weekend of Rivka Galchen’s first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances (FSG), mentioned a kindredness between Galchen’s narrator, a psychiatrist named Leo Liebenstein, and “the tormented narrator…

Weekend Read: “A gigantic figure”

Meaningful art—however long it might take—always reaches its audience. Writers or painters who work in obscurity and struggle to get an agent or gallery to give them a shot will,…

“I wanted and didn’t want to ask”

In my most recent post, I wrote about Lamed Shapiro (1878–1948), a writer whose work was unknown to me before last week (and remains unknown to Wikipedia). Looking at a…

From Where? Whither?

How does one best write about horrible things? By “best” I mean how does one write truthfully about horrible things? By “horrible,” I mean any experience that, because of its…

Weekend Read: “A difference of imagination”

The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare,…

A Staggering Mother

I can picture my brother as a handsome young boy, all eyes and nerves, traipsing about in the muggy drizzle of Glasgow after his tipsy father. In Dublin I have…

Cannot Be Confined Too Fine

“Athletes and people who take an interest in the care of the body do not confine their attentions to physical exercise and attaining a good condition,” begins a novel that…

Weekend Read: “I’ll dance at your wedding.”

The great mass of everything now being sold and promoted everywhere leaves those of us looking for something particularly good at a loss, in the welter, for where to turn.…

The Solid Shelf of Rock

“Kent would have to be raised up by his father, pulled to the solid shelf of rock by his mother.” The sentence comes a quarter of the way into Alice…

The Baby is Beautiful

“What I’m angling for,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in a 1922 letter, “is a specific definite review.” Fitzgerald cast this epistolary line at his friend John Peale Bishop; Bishop had…

Weekend Read: “The literature of social intent”

Today’s weekend read sends you off to lib.ru, a Russian website host to twenty-one interviews with Vladimir Nabokov. Some readers may recognize them from Nabokov’s collection, Strong Opinions. Although I…

Shop Talk

Philip Roth’s new novel—not Exit Ghost, which appeared last October, but Indignation, which will arrive this fall—was sent to reviewers in April for an early look. After I read it,…

On the Fringe of His Line

“You can see the grown man’s 5 o’clock shadow,” Will Blythe wrote this past weekend in The New York Times Book Review, “darkening the smooth cheeks of such baby prose.”…

Weekend Read: “A lizard whose leg you can pluck off”

Today’s weekend read was unearthed after hours of ardent keystrokes not my own–a friend has been researching a book and went to look, using the Advanced Book Search feature of…

Injured by His Large Head

The “chronology”—that sparely written, tidily formatted appendix one finds fitted into the front or back of an edition of a great work by a writer or in a volume dedicated…

His Dream of Himself

“It has been said by a celebrated person,” Edmund Wilson writes at the onset of his 1922 essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald, “that to meet F. Scott Fitzgerald is to…

Weekend Read: Roth’s (Justified) Complaint, or “Document Dated July 27, 1969”

Should novelists respond to their critics? That was the question of a trio of posts from a few weeks back under the title, “An Egg in Return” (1, 2, 3).…

“Calling From Somewhere Above”

Upon pulling a paperback copy of Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth off one of my shelves the other day, a friend expressed frustration with its cover. Not its design (a perfectly attractive…

Dying is Fun

At dawn on April 23, 1899, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg. One hundred years later, The Nabokovian, the twice-yearly publication of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society, conducted…

Weekend Read: A series of small dawns

Joseph O’Neill’s new novel Netherland has been fêted for its many uncommon and careful virtues. The novel is barely underway before O’Neill steamrolls the reader with descriptive writing so vivid…

Lost Among the Inward Parts

The old apothegm: bad books make good movies, good books make bad movies, is, like most backdoor commandments, there to be broken. Today’s New York Times brings a report from…

Wanted to Swap

“Feeling that a style is natural and inevitable,” wrote Guy Davenport in his The Geography of the Imagination, “is like being among people with whom we share tradition and prejudices.”…

An Egg in Return, Part III: “My special islands”

(See: Part I, Part II.) “I think the worst phenomenon, the most upsetting thing nowadays,” Jonathan Franzen said in conversation with James Wood at Harvard, “is the feeling that there’s…

Weekend Read: “A critical mass of critics”

Quite a few serious readers and writers are worried that we are suffering, as a culture, from an absence of intellectually engaged critical writing on fiction. Under the umbrella title…

An Egg in Return, Part II: “There’s no proving it”

A few weeks ago, as I wrote in my most recent post, Jonathan Franzen was speaking with James Wood at Harvard. I asked Franzen what role, if any, reviews and…

An Egg in Return

A few weeks ago, I received an email advertising a free public event at Harvard University. “Award-winning and bestselling author Jonathan Franzen reviews The Corrections with James Wood, Harvard Professor…

Weekend Read: “Ayenbite of inwit”

The week began with the forgotten Josiah Mitchell Morse, (who as of May 14 has been granted his Wikipedia page) and ends with the very few sentences from his typewriter…

“Afraid To Go To the Toilet”

Some readers of Martin Amis’s new collection of essays, The Second Plane: Terror and Boredom (Alfred A. Knopf), have found the marriage of nouns in its subtitle a consternation, an…

Inherently Subversive

Josiah Mitchell Morse was blessed, by birth, with a beautiful American name, but such luck hasn’t been enough to ensure him and his work a place in the cultural memory.…

Among the Reviewers

John Updike and the book-review bugaboo

I buried a novelist

Philip Roth and the end of Zuckerman

The irresponsibility of feelings

Reading Leonard Michaels

Ballad for Americans

The stories of Edward P. Jones

Walking naked

Mary Gaitskill's evolution

White knees

Zadie Smith's novel problem

A world unto himself

The reward of waiting for a debut novel

Make it newish

E.E. Cummings, plagiarism, and the perils of originality

Flying up and flying down

The rise and fall of the American superhero

There Must I Begin to Be

Guy Davenport’s heretical fictions

The Critic as Artist

James Wood???s first novel

The elaborations

Rimbaud at the mercy of biographers