“Fiction was king”

The other day, in his excellent blog at the American Conservative , Alan Jacobs quoted the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, who recalls...

Joseph Epstein, my teacher

Joseph Epstein’s latest book, Essays in Biography , is being praised hither and yon , although the review over at the Millions , referring...

Bonfire of the ethnicities

Tom Wolfe, Back to Blood (Boston: Little, Brown, 2012). 704 pages. Tom Wolfe has now written four novels—four very big novels—since declari...

“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...

Barzun on intellect

Jacques Barzun has a died at the age of 104. Over at Literary Commentary , I have written a short obituary of a man I greatly admired. Aft...

The Island Within

Originally published by Jewish Ideas Daily in May 2010. Revised and expanded. Ludwig Lewisohn is nearly forgotten today, but in his day he ...