From eternity to here

All this week, the Amateur Reader has been examining historical mysteries . Yesterday he made me a lifelong fan by cursing The Lemur by ...

Foe of persistent obscurity

Today is the one hundred and seventeenth birthday of the American idealist philosopher Brand Blanshard, author of the slim but indispensable...

That Old Cape Magic

Richard Russo, That Old Cape Magic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). 261 pp. $25.95. His seventh novel is Richard Russo’s first to come in...

Oakeshott’s conservatism

An excellent essay on Oakeshott by Kenneth Minogue defines the “conservative temperament” as less than a political program. Highly recommen...

Remembering Truman Capote

( Note: Benjamin Stein of the German book blog Turmsegler asked me to write something about Truman Capote on the anniversary of his death. ...

The rich diversity of opinion from A to B

So the New York Times holds a symposium on the question of “Torture and Academic Freedom.” The question is begged, of course, by the very ...

Link wars

Miriam Burstein discovers that China Mieville’s City and the City “constitutes a crash course in Foucault.” Patrick Kurp, visiting his bro...

Five Books of the ’oughts

In writing about Richard Russo’s Empire Falls the other day, I described it as “easily one of the five best American novels” from the firs...

On literary institutions

Calling them “perhaps the most important institutions in American letters” (along with creative writing programs and their literary magazine...

“Goodbye, Columbus” at fifty

Fifty years ago Philip Roth made his literary debut, or at least he published his first book. “ Goodbye, Columbus is a first book,” Saul Be...

Fourth and inches

St. Francis College, located in Brooklyn Heights, has reportedly inaugurated a fifty thousand dollar prize for the best fourth book of fict...

Amateur Barbarians

Robert Cohen, Amateur Barbarians (New York: Scribner, 2009). 401 pp. $27.00. Sentence by sentence, Robert Cohen is perhaps the best prose s...

New York, New York

“That the wealth, the industrial and the social enterprise of the Nation, are rapidly centring in New York City; that here the successful an...

“Un-American”

Quickly, while packing. In my review of Zoë Heller’s sensational novel The Believers , I observed in passing that un-American is a “term u...

The desire machines

Alex Jurek lays into the conclusion of my essay yesterday on Gerald Graff’s Literature Against Itself . [ Update: For some reason Jurek ha...

The harsh style

For this Commonplace Blog ’s precedent-setting two hundred and fiftieth post, I want to say a few words in defense of the harsh style. It is...

Literature Against Itself

As English professors all over the country head back to their classrooms in a few weeks to encourage another young cohort of students to “ex...

The Hack

Wilfrid Sheed’s second novel follows the career of Bert Flax, a self-described “spiritual hack” who supports a fruitful and multiplying fami...

Very queer, indeed

The post below, in a dark green sans-serif typeface, written in the spirit of mockery, may have been a mistake. I have decided not delete it...