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…
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,…
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…
“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…
“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…
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…
“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…
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;…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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,…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
“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…
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,…
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…
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…
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,…
“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…
“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…