Books
The culture of American fiction is never as neatly defined as books like “MFA vs NYC” make it out to be.
Read More“Bernard Malamud is the great sentence-maker, the great craftsman, and the sheer quality of those sentences has never perhaps been given its complete due.”
Read MoreIn the superb “But where is the lamb?,” James Goodman takes up the numerous ramifications, moral and otherwise, of God’s chilling command to sacrifice Isaac and Abraham’s — perhaps more chilling — acquiescence.
Read More“The Haunted Life” is little more than an example of the staggering amount of work it takes for a writer to find his voice, a testament to the years of toil Kerouac put in before forging a style all his own.
Read MoreGiven all the terror and brutality we have lived through just in the thirteen years of this new, 21st century, the story of people running drugs back in the ’70s doesn’t seem to have much urgency.
Read More“Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science” makes a profound claim about the need for cognitive restructuring in the face of information overload.
Read MorePolish writer Marek Hlasko sometimes writes like Hemingway, but without the premium the latter placed on honor and grace.
Read MoreGeorge Orwell strikes me as a man who was easy to love because he had a tenderness in him that runs like a stream throughout these letters and makes you feel, as you read, how much you would have liked to know him.
Read MoreFrench writer Philippe Jaccottet’s ever-questioning poetic analyses of haunting ephemeral perceptions are carried on with such scruple and sincerity that, for his European peers, he has become the model of literary integrity.
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Arts Commentary: Rich in Creativity — But Nothing Else