Hitchens diagnosed with cancer

Christopher Hitchens has released a terse, 37-word statement that he is beginning to receive chemotherapy for cancer of the esophagus. He s...

Spatial form and electronic texts

I’ll say this for the Kindle. It is forcing me to rethink my deepest convictions about literary form. Over at the New Republic , Rochelle Gu...

Why Kindle won’t replace the codex

In the June issue of The American , the economists Richard Swedberg and Thorbjørn Knudsen develop and extend the theories of Joseph A. Schu...

Stealing Home

Sports build character, Joseph C. Phillips writes in a column ahead of Father’s Day, but character is not built merely by picking up a ball...

Three moves equal a burning

I first learned the old saying from Peter Taylor’s 1964 story “The Throughway,” originally published in the Sewanee Review and then collect...

Identifying with their class

Dorothy Rabinowitz advances an interesting (if highly contentious) proposition in this morning’s Wall Street Journal . Namely: the growing ...

Markson dead at 82

David Markson, who is ritually identified as a “postmodern novelist,” died in his Greenwich Village apartment last Friday. He was eighty-tw...

Chabon’s illusions

To a critic, it always comes as a shock to encounter novelists who are pleased with themselves for joining in a chant. The shock comes not b...

The Yeshiva

This morning’s featured article at Jewish Ideas Daily is on Chaim Grade, the great Yiddish novelist whose centennial is celebrated this ye...

The November Criminals

My generally positive review of Sam Munson’s first novel appears in the June issue of Commentary . The November Criminals is a tale told b...

The “flotilla fiasco”

All you need to know about the so-called “flotilla fiasco” is here . Those who prefer words to pictures could do worse than to start with Mo...