Thanksgiving

“And it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving...

Things I will not be writing about

• Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue , the index that Christopher Beam of Slate yucked up for it, or the reasons for the elite disdain toward her....

Every protest’s novel

“ All literature is protest,” Richard Wright shouted at James Baldwin. “You can’t name a single novel that isn’t protest.” Maybe so, Baldwi...

The pursuits of peace

A former student at Texas A&M University—no one is called an alumnus there—wrote yesterday upon reading A Commonplace Blog ’s name in th...

Not that Myers

Cynthia Crossen’s generous mention of A Commonplace Blog in the Friday edition of the Wall Street Journal briefly drove my traffic above ...

Five Books of death at an early age

Ian Wolcott’s moving reflections on The Blood of the Lamb startled me into thinking about other novels in which the death of a child is an...

Call It Sleep

Henry Roth’s classic 1934 novel Call It Sleep belongs as much to Jewish as to American literature. Although it dips liberally into modernis...

Veterans’ books

The literary attitude toward the military was fixed for all time by Rudyard Kipling’s famous line from “ Tommy ,” originally published in Ba...

A cat’s death

There are cat people and there are dog people. Men are not supposed to prefer cats, but I always have. In fact, I resent the implication tha...

The beginning of die Wende

Twenty years ago today the Berlin Wall, the concrete symbol of the Cold War, began to come down. Günter Schabowski, a member of the politbur...

Invisible

Paul Auster, Invisible (New York: Henry Holt, 2009). 308 pp. $25.00. Paul Auster has always been fascinated with the kinds of fiction that ...

Life of Stanley Elkin

Very good news out of Illinois. An uncorrected advance proof of Shouting Down the Silence: A Biography of Stanley Elkin by David C. Dougher...

Racial difference: the board game

Well, I was wrong. When I announced my turn to the Left three weeks ago, I was confident that never again would unstated views be attribute...

A good critic is hard to find

Over at Underbelly, Buce finds that Elsa Morante’s History: A Novel (1977), a “book about the rottenness of war,” does not really belong o...

The Elements of Style

Nearly every writer of my generation has been influenced by The Elements of Style , the Cornell philologist William Strunk’s “little book” r...