“Doctors don’t do hope”

“Doctors don’t do hope anymore,” my wife, herself a doctor, said to me the other day as I was leaving my oncologist’s office. I was complain...

Hitler was an optimist

Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy (New York: Riverhead, 2012). 304 pages. $26.95. Is it possible to be a Jew through literature? Every othe...

Fairy tales from my father

On Thanksgiving morning, my 82-year-old father and I sat together to watch NFL football. Men love sports because we can lose ourselves in th...

Open letter to Philip Roth

On what he has meant to his readers, especially his Jewish readers: the daily feature this morning at Jewish Ideas Daily .

A literary prize for Erdrich—at last

Louise Erdrich has won the National Book Award in fiction for The Round House , her thirteenth novel. (My Commentary review of it is here ...

On the strict separation of literature and politics

The dream of “pure poetry” has beguiled those who would remove literature from the blaring disorderly world, and those who would emasculate ...

Best fiction of 2012

Amazon has released its choices for best books of the year (h/t: Jenny Che at Page Views ). Louise Erdrich’s The Round House , which I revi...

Historical novels

W. D. Howells, too, disliked them. “[I]t is asking a good deal of people in these busy, practical times,” he said, “to go back with you for ...

Statement on my firing

On Thursday afternoon I was fired from my position as literary blogger and book critic for Commentary magazine. The facts are these. At abo...

The conservative case for gay marriage

My post at Commentary ’s Contentions blog on Wednesday, calling upon Republicans to “drop their opposition to same-sex marriage,” occasione...