Literature without children

The novel entitled Lolita is “the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita,” says Humbert Humbert, concluding the novel. Next week I...

In total despair

Kazimierz Brandys would tell his classes in Polish literature that “they are in front of a man who is in total despair ,” according to Patr...

Hollywood novels

Hollywood’s big night of self-congratulation culminated with the Oscar for best film going to Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire . Sean Penn ...

Down with the flu

To explain the sudden slowdown in posting. Everyone in the Commonplace house—both parents, all four children—have been down with the flu. An...

AP English and literary knowledge

The other day a Texas A&M graduate wrote to the English department, soliciting help from the “literature people” in fighting the efforts...

The murderer’s fancy style

Speculating on the table manners of dictators, Nige quotes Lolita . “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” Humbert H...

The novel and the car

Matt Kenseth won the rain-shortened Daytona 500, the opening race of the 2009 NASCAR season, yesterday. In an unexpected and wonderful post...

Ignoring Valentine’s Day

St. Valentine’s Day fell on the sabbath. I feel safe in ignoring it. The literature of love is vaster even than the literature on Lincoln. O...

Top 100 blogs

The Times of London has put up a list of the one hundred best in what reporter Bryan Appleyard calls the “blogscape” (a better word than “b...

How they ignored Lincoln

Little did I know, when I tried earlier today to redraw the map of American literary English to include Lincoln, that I would be nearly alon...

Jumpy beat of American English

“I prefer American English,” Stuart Evers writes in the Guardian ’s book blog, trying to explain why three-quarters of the titles he owns a...

But if she was not a lesbian?

Reading the scholarship on Death Comes for the Archbishop , I stumbled upon the following passage from a ten-year-old article. The author is...

Kindle and kids’ books

With all the buzz over Amazon’s Kindle 2 , and all the handwringing and fist-pumping over the possibility that ebook readers will replace pa...

The fox’s apology

Few are those who, having been introduced to Sir Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction, are not anxious to proclaim themselves a hedgehog. Who ...

Historical novels of faith

Yesterday I started teaching Death Comes for the Archbishop . As befits a student of Gerald Graff, my custom is to place course reading in t...

Repertoires and abilities

For nearly four decades now literary scholars have been keeping themselves awake with the bogey of the canon . The time has long passed for ...

Fiction and the empirical turn

The reason there are not more good novels about sports, Mark Athitakis speculates in a reply to my post on football novels, is that “most s...

On writing in books

Patrick Kurp admits had he “stopped writing in books a long time ago. It came to seem like a form of vandalism, and when I’ve reread my ann...