Books
“Resistance is futile. But resistance seems necessary.”
Being able to comfortably shift gears between “high” and “low” culture is one of the easiest ways in which a contemporary critic can gain the reader’s trust.
L. M. Brown has also written poetry, and she brings some of that lyrical know-how to her promising first novel.
Ethan Mordden’s volume openly defies anyone to dismiss the American musical as mere fluff.
In the end, Philip Roth produced the greatest body of work in the 20th century since William Faulkner and Saul Bellow and I.B. Singer.
Convenience Store Woman is an achievement — a satiric look at a mind that is intent on remaining empty.
Rupert Thomson’s Never Anyone But You is a quiet, expert, and inestimably engaging novel.
Blown is a short and engrossing mystery novel that also stands as a morality play, an ethical fable that suggests that our own selves are perhaps the greatest mystery of all.
There’s something Shakespearian about the grasp of Philip Roth’s fiction.
Book Commentary: “Fahrenheit 451” and Cultural Betrayal
It never occurs to him that, by championing just the great works of Western Civilization and consigning pop culture (notably science-fiction) to the flames, he’s exercising his own pernicious brand of censorship.
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