Essays

The Worth of the Wasted: Shakespeare and Bradley

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A. C. Bradley is a better critic in full than he is in bits and pieces, and Shakespearean Tragedy continues to be an exciting book for anyone interested in literature.
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Essays Notable Articles

Colonoscopy: It’s Time to Check Your Colons

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And, as evidenced in The New York Times and elsewhere, the punctuation push has indeed gone upward. In comments, threads, emails, blogs, newspapers, and magazines, compelling colons abound.
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Essays

A Chiefest Pleasure: Discovering The Sot-Weed Factor on its 50th Birthday

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The deeper you go into your life and your reading, the more precious the long-overlooked gems become once you finally unearth them.
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Essays Lists

Literature is a Manner of Completing Ourselves: A Reader’s Year

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If I were an addict, I would get high and while high, presumably, worry about where I was to get my next fix. Reading is not all that different, I think. As a reader, I am always looking over the binding thinking about the next read, in some instances, longing for it. Some books, like some highs, are better than others. But even with not-so-good books, I will come back to the drug, seeking the next high.
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Essays

Between the Pages

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Being a reader is like playing tricks with time. You turn the page of the fictional story while an hour of your own passes. The characters breathe, laugh and cry, and so do you. When you finish their tale, you close the book and set it aside, dreaming of their ever-after, while stepping out into yours.
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Essays

Oil Plumes and White Noise: On Rereading DeLillo

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We are in a situation similar to the one Delillo lays out in White Noise: things are bad, danger is lurking, but we don’t know its full extent. Our exposure has been consummate, and fatal for the health and economic stability of many, but the final tally is not yet in.
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Essays

The City & The City & The City

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Essays

The Elusive Omniscient

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What seems key about the novel is that what we think of as a historical evolution—or a descent from a unified to a fragmented perspective—isn’t an evolution at all. In fact, the novel has always been insecure. It’s just that the manifestation of its insecurity has changed over time.
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Essays

My Grandmother, the Chinese Censor

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Essays

The Happy Ghost

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Ghostwriting used to be book publishing's dirty little secret. No more. Today a growing cadre of writers are discovering that checking their ego at the door and telling someone else's story can make them very successful, very rich and, in at least one case, as close to happy as most writers will ever get.
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Essays

The Trick of It

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Childhood and adolescence are the great gateway experiences to adulthood, middle-age, the so-called golden years, and then decrepitude. All that, waiting to be unpacked. By that time it’s too big for a backpack. We’re talking about a whole civilization you’ve buried in your backyard.
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Essays

Climbing a Tree, Uncovering a Duck: Writers on Writing

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I've always sought out writing metaphors and similes because they articulate the strangeness, joy, and frustrations of such an abstract activity, one that requires you to dream and to focus at the same time.
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Essays

The Savage Detectives Machete

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Traditionally Spanish publishers stuff their books with introductions and notes. You have to skip the fifty pages of critical essays to read the twelve pages of poems. Although I don't think this novel needs all of that, an answer key, a cheat sheet, what in Argentina they call a machete, might do.
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Essays

Linguistic Revenge: An Alexander Theroux Primer

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Defending of his prose, Theroux once likened it to "a Victorian attic." He delivers more inner life than outer, more desire for vengeance than for anything else, and more sheer stuff per page — stuff you don't expect — than in any other novels.
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Essays

Ayn Rand, Rand Paul and Utopian Schemes

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Conservative "utopias" reject the idea that government or planning of any kind can make the world a better place. Here's why that's not utopian: that's how civilization started.
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Essays Notable Articles

Haruki Murakami and the Art of the Day

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What appealed to me most about Murakami’s essay was the way it joined something very big, like writing a novel, with something very small, like what time each day to go to bed.
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Essays

Skills and Interests

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I see now that writing has proven at least as costly as a pony could have ever been.
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Essays

Found (Again): Shakespeare’s Lost Play Double Falsehood

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Brean Hammond relates the history of Shakespeare's "lost play" in a new Arden edition, with more research than has ever been afforded to a play previously considered merely an “agreeable cheat.”
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