The patriot dead

The first Memorial Day—then called Decoration Day—was held on May 31, 1869, to dedicate the new Cypress Hills National Cemetery in Brooklyn...

Emma Wolf’s stories

Barbara Cantalupo, ed., Emma Wolf’s Short Stories in the Smart Set (Brooklyn: AMS Press, 2010). 247 pp. $87.50. The mother of American Jewi...

Revelation at shul

After praising the scene in Susan Messer’s novel Grand River and Joy in which the main character finds “release” during an accidental visi...

All the way back to Exodus

Susan Messer, Grand River and Joy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). 230 pp. $24.00. Once upon a time, Detroit was a great Je...

Shavuot

The pilgrimage festival of Shavuot , the original basis of the Christian holiday known as Pentecost , begins this evening. A Commonplace Blo...

The decline of region

It is not true that I “blame” the graduate writers’ workshops for the decline of region and place in American fiction, as one commentator c...

A distinguished Prose style

My life-and-works essay on the novelist Francine Prose has been brought out from behind Commentary ’s pay wall, since it leads the list of ...

Trade secrets of a pedagogue

Now that the semester is over—I filed my last grade early this morning—I have some peace and quiet in which to reflect upon teaching. I have...

Grading

Blogging about books, and even replying to complaints about my “literary tunnel vision,” have had to be put on hold while I finish grading m...

Bureaucracy and regionalism

The writers’ workshops have established a nationalized bureaucracy of writers who, in their professional lives, are more loyal to the organi...

The unlocked archives

With the decline of Latin as the language of learning in England during the eighteenth century, scholars in many diverse fields—Gibbon in hi...

The regular and responsible gig

“The book critic with a desire to form himself in the older tradition,” John W. Aldridge said half a century ago, is faced “with a choice be...

Godric

Frederick Buechner’s reinvention of a twelfth-century saint’s life is beginning to attract the attention of other book bloggers, which is ...

Literature and silence

Howard Nemerov defines good writing as getting something right in language. And the only proper response to rightness, he adds, is silence. ...

Ploughing old Zembla

The last text that I ever taught at Texas A&M, if you are curious, was Pale Fire . My students resisted it, or it resisted them, but end...