Sentences

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…

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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,…

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“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.”…

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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…

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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…

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“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…

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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).…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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“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.”…

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(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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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.…

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Contributing Editor Wyatt Mason wrote about the neglected works of author Leonard Michaels (1933–2003) in “The Irresponsibility of Feelings” in the July Harper’s. Subscribers can read his essay now; non-subscribers…

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