Sex and the novel

“[T]he very sound of the word ‘sex’ with its hissing vulgarity and the ‘ks, ks’ catcall at the end,” Nabokov’s narrator says in The Real Lif...

Salinger’s death

J. D. Salinger’s death on Wednesday at the age of ninety-one puts an end to one of America’s strangest literary careers. John Podhoretz has...

Conservative novels

At the National Review ’s staff blog, The Corner, John J. Miller has released the magazine’s list of top ten conservative novels:   1. Alle...

Silence

Life has come crashing down, leaving me with small energy and less to say. Will resume blogging sooner rather than later, though. Update: I...

Literary Life

Larry McMurtry, Literary Life: A Second Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). 175 pp. $24.00. The present volume, the middle layer...

The moral act of writing

“Writing,” Patrick Kurp remarks this morning, “is a moral act (a tautology if we assume every human act possesses a moral component).” This...

Literary mashups

A Canadian reporter has asked my opinion of literary mashups like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monster...

Our national incoherence

Slavery, as Walker Percy says, is America’s original sin. The American people are a massa damnata , a “lump of sin,” which must be exorcised...

Doing both at once

The Language Log recently fielded a query about the difference between two English sentences: ( 1 ) He was playing a violin when the visit...

Moral fashions in criticism

Reflecting on the trolls who commented on a review he had written of James Cameron’s visually stunning and dramatically birdbrained new film...

The Dying Animal

The January issue of Commentary is out, and Philip Roth’s novella The Humbling is reviewed by Sam Sacks, editor of Open Letters Monthly ....

Athitakis celebrates second

Mark Athitakis’s American Fiction Notes is celebrating its second anniversary today. Athitakis keeps the rest of the literary blogscape in...

Predictions 2010

An American will win the Nobel Prize in Literature. It will not be Barack Obama. The Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book ...