Last of the holidays

Here in the Diaspora the holiday of Sukkot comes to an end with Shmini Atseret and Simhat Torah, a 48-hour day-of-rest (in Israel, the two a...

Striking no roots

Over at The Story Is the Cure , a new blog written by an MFA student at Wichita State, Casey Pycior is sure that I am “blaming MFA programs...

Toleration

In an excellent post over at The Maverick Philosopher , Bill Vallicella defends both religious toleration and the proposition that tolerati...

Norman Podhoretz

Thomas L. Jeffers, Norman Podhoretz: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 393 pp. $35.00. Norman Podhoretz has been c...

The Great American Novel

This summer Time magazine put Jonathan Franzen on its cover. “Great American Novelist,” he was called. Lev Grossman helpfully explained : F...

Radio silence, Jewish holiday

If A Commonplace Blog is off the air for the next three days, there must be another Jewish holiday to blame. And what do you know? The holi...

What literary fiction means to me

In the style of the novelist Rick Moody, answering the Paris Review ’s question, “What does American mean to you? Do you consider yourself...

Embracing the limits

Yesterday Wuthering Expectations celebrated its third anniversary. In reflecting upon his experience of book blogging, the Amateur Reader ...

The Blessed Newman

On Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI officially beatified one of the greatest writers of English prose. John Henry Newman has now taken three of th...

Yom Kippur reading

Kol Nidre begins this evening, and with it begins the Jews’ annual 24-hour rite of fasting and repentance . In shul , the biblical book of...

Of straw men and bureaucrats

Over at The Mumpsimus , Matthew Cheney registers his dissent from Elif Batuman’s essay “Get a Real Degree” in the London Review of Books ....

Why awful writing is tolerated

Over at Lit Drift , Jessica Digiacinto asks , in a fed-up voice, why awful writing is tolerated. The proximate cause of her despair is last ...

Jews Without Money

My critical essay on Michael Gold’s 1930 novel Jews Without Money is the main feature this morning at Jewish Ideas Daily . My argument is ...

Who thinks or writes like this?

In a short essay on Ethan Frome over at Interpolations , Kevin Neilson quotes two passages by the novel’s narrator, who says about himself...

George Hitchcock, 1914–2010

The news has only now reached me that George Hitchcock has died at the age of ninety-five after a long illness (h/t: Mark Athitakis ). Geor...

Politics and literature

My comment Sunday on the news that President Obama is reading Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom was not intended to be a political comment,...

Obama and Franzen sittin’ in a tree

When President Obama was “spotted” on Martha’s Vineyard (as if he had not planned to be seen) with Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom , he...

Remembering 9/11

Nine years ago today I was driving from Houston to College Station when Islamists hijacked four passenger jets in a coordinated attack upon ...

Rosh Hashanah 5771

This is just to wish all my Jewish readers a shanah tovah and to prod my non-Jewish readers into wishing me a happy new year! Talk to you o...

Against creative writing

I have been charged—by whom is irrelevant—with being “against creative writing.” And it is true that I have been hard on creative writing, b...