“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…
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…
“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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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,…
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…
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,…
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, &…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
“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…
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.…