A writer’s desk

The work week has ended, and the Sabbath queen is on her way. Maybe tomorrow I will clear away some of the clutter. Not now, though; not now...

The question in criticism

Everyone seems to like what I have asserted about literary criticism, at least “on a high level,” as Jake Seliger puts it , but no one reall...

Careers in criticism

The reason so much literary criticism is “crap”—his word, not mine—is careerism, Elberry says . He shares an anecdote: I was talking to a yo...

Criticism’s returns

In an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education , Mark Bauerlein concludes that literary scholarship has reached the point of “diminishin...

America’s leading Catholic novelist

Calling it “one of the finest novels of recent years,” Ted Gioia nominates Richard Russo’s novel Empire Falls for the new canon. I agree, ...

Five Books of immigrants

Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal , Matthew Kaminski selected the five best novels about immigrants to America—three of the five publish...

News items

On which I have no opinion: • The arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.—although about his scholarship, yes . • The death of Frank McCou...

A Happy Marriage

Rafael Yglesias, A Happy Marriage (New York: Scribner, 2009). 369 pp. $26.00. Few books have disappointed me more than Rafael Yglesias’s no...

On vacation

“How perillous vacancie from affaires hath ever bene, may appeare by ancient and moderne examples, whose Tragicall catastrophe wold crave t...

Self-reference and narcissism

It is fast becoming a commonplace of American criticism that frequent use of the first person betokens narcissism. Last month Stanley Fish r...

Thicker than Water

Vera Caspary is almost completely forgotten today, but in her day she was something of a literary pioneer. The White Girl (1929), her first...

Five Books of Jewish fiction

Tim Davis asks me to “recommend [a] handful of books (fiction) in which Judaism either is a central theme or is the foundational spirit the ...

The Middle of the Journey

“Yech,” said my neocon friend when I told him that I admired The Middle of the Journey . Yet Lionel Trilling’s 1947 novel—Trilling himself—i...

New issues, frames, non-existent empires

The second issue of Daniel E. Pritchard’s Critical Flame is up. Nora Delaney looks at Mark McGurl’s Program Era , while three different re...

Suspended in literary amber

For the past fifty-eight years, Holden Caulfield has been “stuck in time and place on the 256 pages J. D. Salinger allotted him in 1951’s Th...

Ideology as cultural marker

Man from the cradle is a racist. He prefers his own kind and turns up his nose, sometimes literally, at those from the next tribe. Or so, at...