A light summer’s reading

I have made no secret that most of my time this summer has been taken up with what is euphemistically called “relocating.” Other than books ...

Hello, Columbus

My family and I arrived in Columbus several days ago, and are settling in. While the locals complain of a heat wave, we newcomers from south...

Frank Kermode dies at 90

The literary critic Sir Frank Kermode has died at the age of ninety. His most recent book, Concerning E. M. Forster , completed a return to...

Neocon critics

Terry Teachout, ed., Beyond the Boom: New Voices on American Life, Culture, and Politics (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991). 237 pp. $18.95. ...

Absence of Mind

Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010)...

13 epigrams

These were published many years ago, in an obscure pamphlet issued by Robert L. Barth; then I set them aside and forgot them. The only epigr...

Singermann

My essay on Myron Brinig’s 1929 novel Singermann is up this morning at Jewish Ideas Daily . If the novel is ever reprinted, as it should b...