Howard Nemerov

In honor of the ninetieth anniversary of his birth tomorrow, I offer this appreciation of Howard Nemerov, which was originally published in ...

An objective, True story

One commentator to my earlier post on unreliable narrators is also bothered by the concept, because it “implies that there’s an objective, T...

Unreliable narrators

In the Manchester Guardian , the British novelist Harry Sutton tosses off an unreliable list of the ten best unreliable narrators of all ti...

Bend Sinister

“Free Speech,” says the apologist for tyranny, “is an important value but it is not the ultimate value.” Vladimir Nabokov took the opposite...

Life without cheese . . .

. . . is not worth living. At National Review ’s Corner blog, Andrew Stuttaford quotes Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s speech at the Conservative Poli...

And quiet flow the links

Over at the Denver Bibliophile , Adlai Jurek studies the tragic element in Roth’s American Pastoral . He says that Nathan Zuckerman is wron...

No more anonymity

As of 12:00 noon Central time today, A Commonplace Blog will accept no more anonymous comments. They will be rejected without further consi...

Carried to Orthodoxy

On Monday, Rod Dreher neatly summarized the argument for Orthodox Judaism. Although it was supposed to wither and die in freedom’s-just-ano...

Other Things Being Equal

For Jewish Ideas Daily , a new aggregator of Jewish things from around the web, I will be surveying the history of American Jewish fiction, ...

Free speech—but not for Jews

By now, the disruption of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech by Islamist students at the University of California at Irvine earlier th...

Fiction’s job

Earlier in the month, Mark Athitakis speculated that fiction’s job is to be good fiction. He worried that the proposition is tautological, ...

Antisocial teenaged narrators

Reading the galleys of a forthcoming novel about a seventeen-year-old high-school student who has problems with grownups, I was reminded jus...

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Nabokov wrote his first English-language novel—after writing eight in Russian—while living in Paris during the winter of 1938–’39. New Direc...

We can change the story!

This morning, preparing breakfast for my four children, I listened in on the PBS Kids program they were watching. Super Why! retells fairy ...

The Era of Theory

George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 256 pp. $19.95. Originally published in Commentary (February ...

Sex and the novel, cont.

My claim is that, since some time in the first decades of the twentieth century—after the best work of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, that ...

Literary drunks and addicts

A correspondent sends a link to a Life magazine gallery of “famous literary drunks and addicts.” All twenty-nine are famous, all right, bu...