Good, better, best

Art Durkee deserves credit for rising to my challenge to show just how my five definitive propositions about literature are conservative o...

Houston dies at 75

The California novelist James D. Houston died last Thursday from cancer at the age of seventy-five. Houston taught at Santa Cruz while I wa...

Conservative, essentialist

In his comment to Frank Wilson’s kind link to my post on argument and monologue, Art Durkee says that my definitions of literature reflect ...

Nths of a sending

On Sunday, Stephen Romei asked , “What are the best final sentences in literature?” He himself nominated the last sentences of Der Prozess ,...

Argument and monologue

A sadly neglected portion of graduate training—in any field, not just English—is what might be called the ethics of argument. Young scholars...

Strout brings home Pulitzer

Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge , a novel in stories about life in small-town Maine, has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In its...

Truth-telling does not get much better

Although I have small interest in popular culture, and even less in reality TV, like pretty much everyone else in the English-speaking world...

Miscast—again

I should be nonplussed, I suppose, to have been cast as Garth Knight in Elberry’s remake of Robin of Sherwood . But it is refreshing to lea...

Don’t go there

In the name of God, what are two books by Jonathan Culler doing alongside Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham, F. R. Leavis, and J. M. Coetzee...

Miles Franklin short list

The shortlist for the 2009 Miles Franklin Award was released yesterday. One of the nominees is a personal favorite. Tim Winton is compared ...

Top 10 forgotten prize winners

The American Book Exchange has compiled a list of the Top 10 Forgotten Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novels (h/t: Books, Inq. ). First on the list...

The error behind Amazon’s

So Larry Kramer, who has also collected eighteen thousand signatures on a petition calling for a boycott, does not think —not for one second...

Post and run

Hate to post and run, but last two days of Passover start in half an hour. Comments here are moderated, because in the past I have received ...

A fan’s notes

Jessa Crispin has exactly the right response to the hysterical claims that rang out across the literary blogscape that Amazon was “censori...

Would someone explain. . .

. . . what either occurrence of the word literary refers to in the following sentence : “Th[e] ability to enlist various kinds of writing n...

The gods cannot be proved

In a provocative day-after-Easter post, Elberry considers the historical basis of Christianity—the subject also of an early essay by Michae...

Posterity makes its choice

Over the first days of Passover, I rested from my labors and reread Cakes and Ale (1930). It is W. Somerset Maugham’s best, the only one of...

Doctrine suspended in the void

In the latest Weekly Standard , Edward Short begins a review of Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Critical Writings by quoting from Henry James: T...

An undeserved honor

Many thanks to Mark Sarvas of Elegant Variation for including A Commonplace Blog among the “Top 10 Really, Really Smart Literary Blogs.” A...

Hag kasher v’sameyah

A happy Passover to kol Yisrael . Tonight Jews all over the world sit down to read, study, and reenact a famous work of literature called si...

Criticism and the police

Daniel Green continues to police the stray and fugitive remarks about literary criticism that steal across the literary blogscape. His lates...

Swept along by Stanley Elkin

Earlier this morning Nige recorded his first encounter with Stanley Elkin’s brilliant and rollicking Dick Gibson Show . “Elkin is, among ot...

What to do about Rochester

Lord Rochester’s verse poses a problem of a different magnitude from Mr. Sammler’s Planet . Instead of the occasional blemish, or what Mark ...

The quantification dodge

In his April Fool’s Day post, Will Wilkinson takes on what he calls “the meaning dodge.” What he means by this phrase, although he is not s...

Clearance items

History is what cannot be fooled. Where the writer is obscure, he is still in the process of getting things done; where he is clear, he is f...

Isaac Rosenfeld

Steven J. Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 240 pp. $27.5...