Single-minded devotion to literature

Transcribing J. V. Cunningham’s lecture notes on the history of criticism, principally on form and style, reminded me of something that Orwe...

Cunningham’s history of criticism

Note: In the spring of 1976, I took a seminar on the history of literary criticism with J. V. Cunningham, who was the Hurst Visiting Profes...

Gildersleeve on verse and prose

Basil Gildersleeve, the great and irritable classicist who became Johns Hopkins University’s first professor of Greek, said at the very beg...

Introduction to Flashman

After stalling for many unconscionable years, I have finally begun to read the late George MacDonald Fraser’s twelve-volume Flashman Papers,...

The problem of Bellow’s masterpiece

Mr. Sammler’s Planet is a great novel—one of the ten best English-language novels since the death of George Eliot—but it presents the gene...

A book’s material condition

Nige follows up my followup to his reflections on the future of the book by making a strong case for reading on the page instead of reading...

Future of the book

Still skeptical that the digital book will replace the codex, Nige wonders whether, unlike musical selections, there is “something special ...

Orange Prize long list

The long list for the Orange Prize, awarded annually since 1993 to the best full-length novel in English by a woman during the previous year...

One-book authors

In the Times of London, Luke Leitch compiles a list of literary one-hit wonders (h/t: Mark Sarvas ): • Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird ....

Five best of Irish fiction

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, Stefan Beck has offered , over at the New Criterion ’s Arma Virumque blog, a “Five Best of Irish Lit” (no A ...

Charles McCarry

Just finished a piece for Commentary on Shelley’s Heart , the seventh of Charles McCarry’s novels to be reissued by the Overlook Press. (It...

No other book has the same effect

Over at the Blog of a Bookslut, Nina MacLaughlin has a remarkable look back at Scott Spencer’s 1979 novel Endless Love . MacLaughlin captur...

Miles Franklin long list

The long list for the 2009 Miles Franklin Award, the most prestigious literary award in Australia, has been released (h/t: Matilda ). When ...

Pull out his eyes, Apologize, Apologize

In commenting upon my interpretation of Lolita as an act of repentance, R. J. Keefe is “heartened by [my] students’ insistence upon apology...

The enactment of moral experience

Lolita is the greatest novel ever written in English, because alone among English-language novels it is the enactment of a moral experience...

Beware of writers’ politics

Haruki Murakami may be a great novelist, but he is also a political buffoon. Most writers are. As the German novelist Daniel Kehlman said a...