Bye, bye, literature

As the year coughs to a stop, I find myself thinking more and more about the disappearance of a literary culture in America where books are ...

Denis Dutton, 1944–2010

My old friend, mentor, and collaborator Denis Dutton has died in Christchurch, New Zealand, of prostate cancer. He was sixty-six. Dutton, a...

Deliberate omissions

The universal reaction to book lists is annoyance over what has been left out. Everyone remembers the uproar at this time last year when Pub...

Year’s best American novel

’Tis the season, as Christopher Benson says, for best-book lists. At First Things , Benson compiles his own list, which has a distinctly Ch...

Against “net neutrality”

In a comment to an earlier post, Shelley Shaver warns that today the Federal Communications Commission will begin the long process of regul...

The Shark-Infested Custard

After registering my dissent on Kurt Vonnegut’s canonization by the Library of America, I guess that I have to come up with a better noveli...

No on Vonnegut

The Library of America has made the weird and unpardonable decision to release an omnibus volume of fiction by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The volume...

Anthony Powell

This month the University of Chicago Press is republishing, in ebook format, a landmark of twentieth-century English fiction—Anthony Powell’...

Hanukkah

Among my pet peeves is the common American greeting, “Happy holidays!” The intent is to offend no one—which, at this season of the year, mea...

Let Franzen ring

“Let Franzen Ring,” my sour review of Freedom , appears in the December issue of Commentary . In it, I try to assign Franzen a place in the...