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...