Jewish sin and repentance

Another Yom Kippur, another difficult fast . It never seems to get any easier. Toward the end of Avinu Malkenu yesterday, during the Neilah ...

The regional basis of a hard heart

Last night, during the Republican presidential debate in Orlando, Florida, Governor Rick Perry defended his state’s decision to admit the ch...

Men and friendship

This morning I heard from a longtime friend who, like me, has recently moved from Houston to another city. “Big community here and easy to g...

Maybe not just an archive after all

So I’ve decided that A Commonplace Blog will not “continue to exist, but as an archive,” despite what I originally wrote below. I find tha...

LITERARY COMMENTARY

As of today, A Commonplace Blog will be succeeded by a new book blog hosted and sponsored by Commentary magazine. The new blog will be cal...

#overrated

It’s the question that everyone has an answer to. What is the most overrated book of all time? The three titles most often cited are Ulysses...

The tyranny of suspense

Don’t know when exactly A Commonplace Blog will move into its new digs and hang out a new shingle. In the mean time, I need to get back to ...

The end of the beginning

Several people have written—friends, readers, the morbidly curious—to ask when I am coming back, if A Commonplace Blog will resume normal o...

Ain’t no cure for the summertime blues

This evening marks the beginning of the two-day Jewish holiday of Shavuot, the “forgotten festival,” as Michael Carasik describes it at Jew...

Memorial Day is not victims’ day

Over at Contentions , I reflect upon Memorial Day by contrasting Allen Tate’s “ Ode to the Confederate Dead ” to Robert Lowell’s thirty-yea...

The books we never abandon

Cross-posted from Contentions . “[T]he end of the physical book may be coming hard upon us faster than anyone ever anticipated,” John Podhor...

Black discs and retrieval machines

Even my conservative friends are enamored of the argument that books are going the way of the vinyl LP. (True, the vinyl LP was introduced i...

Philip Roth and the politics of literary prizes

Cross-posted from Contentions . The American novelist Philip Roth has won the Man Booker International Prize, a British award handed out ev...

Not the end of books

Over at Contentions John Podhoretz warns that “the end of the physical book may be coming hard upon us faster than anyone ever anticipated...

Defending Philip Roth

Philip Roth has won the Man Booker International Prize, and a judge on the prize jury has quit in a huff. “Emperor’s clothes,” says Carmen...

The paradoxical politics of creative writing

Note: Blogger went down some time on Thursday, May 12th, taking down everything posted since the previous evening along with it. To date the...

When I Lived in Modern Times

The British novelist Linda Grant is in the States today to tout her new novel We Had It So Good , but with her royal-wedding tweets still ch...

The rhetoric of triumph

Over at Contentions , I use a little literary criticism to compare President Obama’s speech last night reporting the death of Osama bin La...

Like a trampled corpse

They who behold you stare; They peer at you closely: “Is this the man Who shook the earth, Who made realms tremble, Who made the world like ...

Epitaph on a Tyrant

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his ha...

Reading the Holocaust

Today is Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. Jean Améry once said that he would like to “introduce certain Auschwitz books into the ...

Joining COMMENTARY

Just a quick note to announce that I have become the Online Editor of Commentary magazine, where I will be working with editor John Podhor...

The inadequacy of literature

For a long time now, on this blog and elsewhere, I have been hawking the idea that literature is not a special class of human efforts (“Imag...

Novels about Jesus

On this Easter morning I have been thinking about all of the bad fiction about Jesus of Nazareth written by those who believe in him. Some o...

Christians and Passover

A reader of my Reflections on Good Friday at Contentions writes to advise me that not all Christians who celebrate Passover are doing so t...