Thomas Filbin
Literary critic Malcolm Cowley’s in-the-trenches vision of modernism deserves to extend beyond the halcyon epoch he witnessed — a case made splendidly by Gerald Howard’s biography.
What our planet needs now is the reincarnation of a writer who, while combing through the nooks and crannies of society for painful truths, uses depictions of the present to demand future changes.
Horace advocated that seizing the immediate with existential zest.
If you want to tell people the truth,” quipped Oscar Wilde, “make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.” Louis Bayard’s novel offers a compelling vision of what happened to Oscar and his family when the laughter stopped.
The reissue of this novel now is valuable, beyond its considerable historical and aesthetic virtues, because it makes pertinent points about today’s world, bedeviled by war, misery, poverty, and the enticing lure of despotism as an answer to democracy’s shortcomings.
Ludmila Ulitskaya’s stories are fatalistic in spirit, but not morose.
Anthony Burgess considered Ford Madox Ford to be the greatest of 20th century English novelists.
The point of the revelatory exercises in Second Star is to mentally invigorate, to sharpen how we look at the things in plain sight that we take for granted.
Éric Vuillard’s method is to create an ironic rapport with the powerful: his vignettes dramatize how France’s elite delude themselves into thinking the colonial world order can be kept intact after World War Two.
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