The Passover Haggadah

Passover, which begins at sundown this evening, is similar to most other Jewish holidays in being organized around a book. It is unlike Yom ...

“Reading skeletons”

I very much like Tim Davis’s notion of “ reading skeletons .” These are not the same as guilty pleasures. They are the books and writers you...

Plot and pattern

It is certainly true, as my critics protest, that there is more than one way to hold a novel together. There is, for example, the dramatic m...

In blog news

Kevin Neilson, who for the past eight months has hosted Between the Lines , a blog specializing in literary interviews, has now started his ...

I’ve got to brag

In his appreciation of Lewis Carroll in the March 22nd issue of National Review , Theodore Dalrymple writes: The protean nature and appeal ...

“Experimental writing”

My defense of plot as the intellectual element in prose fiction “leaves out nearly every experimental writer and giddy rule-breaking novel...

Witte Arrives

Elias Tobenkin was the first Jew in America to write a novel celebrating radical politics, but if Witte Arrives is any example, radicalism ...

Surrendering to responsibility

Struggling to understand my appreciation of Chang-rae Lee’s Surrendered , Mark Athitakis wonders whether I am giving Lee “credit for some o...

The damage is done

Seven years ago, when the Democrats in the U.S. Senate filibustered several of President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees, Republicans flo...

Psychology and lost legs

Yesterday Mark Athitakis offered some astute and provocative reflections on Chang-rae Lee’s massive new novel The Surrendered , which I hav...

“Believable character”

My best male students have been pestering me to go see Martin Scorsese’s new film Shutter Island , a cop thriller with Leonard DiCaprio play...

Ingenuity in plotting

“What about the idea that plot should be ingenious, complicated,” Elizabeth Bowen wondered—“a display of ingenuity remarkable enough to comm...

Refutation in verse

Thomas Hardy’s Hap is also an argument in verse, although it is not a syllogism but a simple modus ponens : If but some vengeful god would ...

Argument in verse

In his comment to my reflections on plot and thought, Brandon Watson suggests , without developing the idea further, that one of lyric poetr...

Plot and thought

On Saturday, as if replying in her own way to Bill Vallicella’s argument on the relative merits of philosophy and fiction, the novelist Reb...

The literary fuzzhead

Bill Vallicella is not impressed by the novelist John Gardner, who once claimed that “at their best, both fiction and philosophy do the sam...

10 rules for criticism

Fifteen British writers have inscribed their rules for writing, ten or fewer, taking Elmore Leonard’s as a point of departure. I might as ...

Barry Hannah, 1942–2010

Barry Hannah, novelist and story writer out of Mississippi, has died of a heart attack in Oxford, Miss. He was sixty-seven. Hannah started ...

The Fugitive

My “ retrieval ” of Ezra S. Brudno’s 1904 apostasy novel The Fugitive , published in 1904 by Doubleday, Page, appears this morning at Jewish...