Fiction’s job

Earlier in the month, Mark Athitakis speculated that fiction’s job is to be good fiction. He worried that the proposition is tautological, ...

Antisocial teenaged narrators

Reading the galleys of a forthcoming novel about a seventeen-year-old high-school student who has problems with grownups, I was reminded jus...

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Nabokov wrote his first English-language novel—after writing eight in Russian—while living in Paris during the winter of 1938–’39. New Direc...

We can change the story!

This morning, preparing breakfast for my four children, I listened in on the PBS Kids program they were watching. Super Why! retells fairy ...

The Era of Theory

George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 256 pp. $19.95. Originally published in Commentary (February ...

Sex and the novel, cont.

My claim is that, since some time in the first decades of the twentieth century—after the best work of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, that ...

Literary drunks and addicts

A correspondent sends a link to a Life magazine gallery of “famous literary drunks and addicts.” All twenty-nine are famous, all right, bu...