Silence after the Holocaust

In the letters section of the latest Commentary , a time-honored intellectual debate is rejoined. Was there or was there not a “two-decade s...

Literary ideology of adultery

Like everyone else in the country, I have followed the revelations of Gov. Mark Sanford’s on-the-job adultery with stomach-turning fascinati...

Jewish hipsters do exist—but not for long

I had not even received contributor’s copies of the July/August issue of Commentary including my essay “The Judaism Rebooters” before I was...

Five Books of boxing

Light blogging today, because I have been doing something with books other than reading them—building a new bookcase for myself, using the n...

Schaub at Bookslut

My former student Michael Schaub is filling in for Jessa Crispin at Blog of a Bookslut . I highly recommend anything he writes. Michael is p...

Five Books of baseball

(1.) John R. Tunis, The Kid from Tomkinsville (1940). Roy Tucker, a rookie pitcher who wins fifteen straight for the Brooklyn Dodgers, suff...

On being a father

To recognize the day I wanted to reel off the Five Books of fatherhood, but I came up nearly empty. There just are not five books—at least n...

Hidden influence of anthologies

Yesterday Buce took up Terry Teachout’s challenge to name fifteen mind-forming books in fifteen minutes. The most striking entry on his lis...

15 books in 15 minutes

Via his co-blogger Carrie Frye, Terry Teachout passes on this quick game. Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’v...

Winton wins Miles Franklin

For the fourth time. Australia’s leading literary award went to Tim Winton, whose surfing novel Breath manages the rare feat of being both...

An end to readings

In an article reprinted from the Chronicle of Higher Education , the literary scholar Mark Edmundson (Department of English, University of V...

Five Books of professors

(1.) Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (1925). Critics complain that the middle section, and the whole two-stories-in-one approach, does ...

Censorship’s last gasp

The microchip and the birth-control pill were introduced fifty years ago, and a new age dawned. So says a new book reviewed by Edward Kosne...

The ideal of the gentleman

On his lunch break, Patrick Kurp has been reading Shirley Robin Letwin’s philosophical study of The Gentleman in Trollope (1982). “[T]he m...

Five Books of academe

I am introducing what I expect to become a regular feature of this Commonplace Blog. Taking a hint from the Wall Street Journal ’s occasiona...

So you want to read a book?

In a comment on my review of Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows , Shawna asks whether I have “must-reads in any genre” to recommend. Here is on...

Only during stays

Perhaps the basic question about The Shawl , Cynthia Ozick’s little pair of stories originally printed in the New Yorker and released as a ...