Every protest’s novel

“ All literature is protest,” Richard Wright shouted at James Baldwin. “You can’t name a single novel that isn’t protest.” Maybe so, Baldwi...

The pursuits of peace

A former student at Texas A&M University—no one is called an alumnus there—wrote yesterday upon reading A Commonplace Blog ’s name in th...

Not that Myers

Cynthia Crossen’s generous mention of A Commonplace Blog in the Friday edition of the Wall Street Journal briefly drove my traffic above ...

Five Books of death at an early age

Ian Wolcott’s moving reflections on The Blood of the Lamb startled me into thinking about other novels in which the death of a child is an...

Call It Sleep

Henry Roth’s classic 1934 novel Call It Sleep belongs as much to Jewish as to American literature. Although it dips liberally into modernis...

Veterans’ books

The literary attitude toward the military was fixed for all time by Rudyard Kipling’s famous line from “ Tommy ,” originally published in Ba...

A cat’s death

There are cat people and there are dog people. Men are not supposed to prefer cats, but I always have. In fact, I resent the implication tha...