Sentences

“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…

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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…

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“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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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,…

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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,…

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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…

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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,…

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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, &…

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“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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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,…

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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…

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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…

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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,…

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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…

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“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…

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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.…

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