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 in Nigel Beale’s stack of books to lug home from South Africa?

The Los Angeles Times handicaps the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, to be announced Monday. Top three picks: Marilynne Robinson’s Home (too Christian), John Updike’s Widows of Eastwick (the jury won’t award the prize posthumously), and Philip Roth’s Indignation (not a “big”-enough Roth). You heard it here first. The winner will be Louise Erdrich’s Plague of Doves.

Jerome Weeks appears to have abandoned Book/Daddy.

Ben Kipela discovers the nineteenth-century American poet Agnes Lee, who leads him to reread J. V. Cunningham. Any poet who achieves such an effect deserves immediate immortality.

Maud Newton interviews Marlon James, another of those novelists who has turned his back upon the unspeakable evils of capitalism to write instead of slavery.

“After a steady diet of Victorian Catholic novelists,” Miriam Burstein cheats with Stephen Booth’s Kill Call and Ruth Rendell’s Birthday Present.

Making sure that more Pulitzer Prize-winners are not forgotten, Roger K. Miller praises The Bridge of San Luis Rey (final verdict: plenty of riches, but not perfect) and one of the reviewers at Mookse and the Gripes tackles Humboldt’s Gift (arouses a curiosity about his three National Book Award-winning novels, but not for “all things Bellow”).

Patrick Kurp celebrates fiction’s ability to draw together disparate events.

And Daniel Green continues to ignore his incoherence on the question of literature.