“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…
“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…
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…
“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.”…
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…
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…
“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…
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).…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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.”…
(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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…