My net worth

In a comment that I deleted because of its vitriolic irrelevance, a reader suggests that my proposal to take away the university faculty’s ...

I can’t read it if I don’t notice it

Over at A Memory Theater , Adlai Jurek admits to himself that there are books he will never read. Not because he has made the conscious dec...

Two years old today

A Commonplace Blog is two years old. On October 20, 2008, at 11:09 in the morning, I posted a review of Philip Roth’s Indignation to spank...

Do not miss

Miriam Burstein’s provocative reconsideration of Stanley Crawford’s brilliant 1978 novel Some Instructions to my Wife Concerning the Upkeep...

Restoring academic balance

Over at the National Review ’s academic blog Phi Beta Cons , the political scientist Robert Weissberg offers a solution to the problem of t...

Nemesis

Philip Roth, Nemesis (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). 280 pp. $26.00. In the front matter to his latest novel, Philip Roth groups...

National Book Award nominees

The five finalists for the National Book Award in fiction were announced earlier today. They are: Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in Ameri...

A new Athitakis

Daniel Athitakis was born yesterday , and is already glaring at his father skeptically. All fathers know that look. Congratulations, Mark, o...

Animadversions of a reactionary

“Lifting a rock only to drop it on one's own feet” is a Chinese folk saying to describe the behavior of certain fools. The reactionaries...

The Nobel Prize winner

For 2010 is the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who was laureled “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant ...

Should McCarthy win the Nobel?

As of this morning, Cormac McCarthy is the betting favorite to win the Nobel Prize in literature. [ Update: The final odds of his win, whic...

Two lives of tradition

Reading in shul on Saturday instead of listening to the Torah, I came upon this passage in Gershom Scholem: There is also a life of traditi...

Wright Morris, 1910–2010

On Saturday, the Lone Tree Literary Society will celebrate the centennial of novelist Wright Morris’s birth with a conference in Central Ci...

Predicting the Nobel

Last year I predicted that Peruvian poet Carmen Ollé would be the 2009 Nobel laureate in literature. Romanian-born German novelist Herta Mü...