Michiko Kakutani, A Critic with a Fixation by Ben Yagoda

Michiko Kakutani recently embarked on her 25th year as a New York Times book critic, and it's gotten to the point that when her name is mentioned in print, you can see the smoke rising from the page. <<read more>>

The Global Id by John Lanchester
On the one hand, Google is cool. On the other hand, Google has the potential to destroy the publishing industry, the newspaper business, high street retailing and our privacy. <<read more>>

Hard-wired to Seek Beauty by Denis Dutton

The usefulness of the arts for survival is demonstrated by the universal human tendency to reconstruct reality in the imagination. <<read more>>

The Artist as a Young Mandarin by David Barber

In trying to fathom an imagination as protean as Eliot's... no amount of learned conjecture can put the genius back in the bottle: One can get all the facts straight without ever getting the goods. Virtually in spite of itself, then, this latest stab at pathobiography winds up lending still greater credence to Eliot's famous axiom that ''the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." The more we know about Eliot's imperfect life, the more perfectly astonishing his daemonic creations appear. <<read more>>

Henry Green, the last English Modernist by James Wood
To devotees of Henry Green, it seems extraordinary that a writer who gives so much pleasure should remain so essentially neglected: the unstopping, tissueless sentences travelling without delay of punctuation – those sentences which seem to drop a stitch and unravel just as you thought you were sewing up their meaning (“We lived here in the early years, in soft lands and climate influenced by the Severn, until my grandfather died and we moved to the big house a mile nearer the river where it went along below the garden”); the metaphors and similes, which float the strangest, rarest likenesses (a character’s eyes catching the light “like plums dipped in cold water”); the psychological subtlety, with its deep, delicate understanding of tragicomic fantasy; the authorial tact, content to let the reader move without explanatory signals, so that, as Coleridge said of Shakespeare, his characters “like people in real life, are to be inferred by the reader”; and above all the genius for speech, especially working-class, regional, and dialect speech, perhaps the greatest facility for the writing of dialogue in twentieth-century English fiction (less hammy than Kipling, more various than Lawrence, more inventive than Pritchett). <<read more>>

When Darwin Meets Dickens by Nick Gillespie

One of the subtexts of this year's Modern Language Association conference -- and, truth be told, of most contemporary discussions of literary and cultural studies -- is the sense that lit-crit is in a prolonged lull. There's no question that a huge amount of interesting work is being done -- scholars of 17th-century British and Colonial American literature, for instance, are bringing to light all sorts of manuscripts and movements that are quietly revising our understanding of liberal political theory and gender roles -- and that certain fields -- postcolonial studies, say, and composition and rhetoric -- are hotter than others. But it's been years -- decades even -- since a major new way of thinking about literature has really taken the academic world by storm.  <<read more>>

The Reading Crisis from n+1

The reading crisis, like the social security crisis, has become a con-game based on facts. The NEA announces there are fewer literary readers than two decades ago. Books continue to have more competition from non-book technologies. Will people still read in 2060? As with Social Security, there are variables one just doesn’t know how to project forward: fewer people read books but more want to write them, and more and more books are published. A real debate could be had about all these things. Instead we get the “reading crisis.” <<read more>>

 

Yeah, but the Book Is Better by Thane Rosenbaum
Whenever a film is adapted from a favorite novel, serious readers of fiction are prone to say, "Yeah, but the book is better." True partisans of the written page are always in conflict with those who like their stories cinematically revealed, projected onto wide screens that illuminate the darkness and pierce the quiet with Dolby Surround sound. The magic of movies, for so many in our increasingly visual society, is a far more stimulating and efficient storytelling experience than the labor intensity of reading. <<read more>>
 

Why Have There Been No Great Women Comic-Book Artists? by Carly Berwick
With a dual-venue exhibition in Los Angeles, comics by masters such as Winsor McCay, Chris Ware, and Charles Schulz have been elevated from pop culture to fine art. But as these artists receive their due, the show has sparked debate over the rightful place of women in the comic canon. <<read more>>
 

Parables of a Violent World by Michael Wood

"A piecemeal atlas of the world I think in" was William T. Vollmann's phrase for a book he wrote almost ten years ago. That world is certainly worth mapping. It is full of contemporary history, politics, guns, prostitution, drugs, crowds, and violence. But it is also the shifting residence of a lonely, obsessive reader and writer determined to make sense of things. The work in question is in fact called The Atlas (1996), and contains fifty-five items of varying length, written alternatively in the first and third person, from the point of view of a male traveler, set in an impressive list of locations around the globe, from Afghanistan to Zagreb, and from Grand Central Station to the Yukon.

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Kafka: The Decisive Years by Reiner Stach reviewed by Michael Dirda

Like Pascal, Kierkegaard and Baudelaire, Franz Kafka (1883- 1924) is one of the great masters of spiritual desolation. We don't actually read his work, we are harrowed by it. In German of classical directness and purity, this desk functionary of the Prague Workers' Accident Insurance Institute presents tableau after tableau of what Pascal called " la misère de l'homme sans Dieu ," the misery of man without God. All of Kafka's unfortunate protagonists -- Georg Bendemann in "The Judgment," Gregor Samsa in "The Metamorphosis," Josef K. in The Trial -- struggle against the one great, serious truth about life: Each of us is fundamentally and inescapably alone, especially in the face of death.  <<read more>>

Back to Utopia by Joshua Glenn

Can the antidote to today's neoliberal triumphalism be found in the pages of far-out science fiction?  In 1888, when Massachusetts newspaperman Edward Bellamy published his science fiction novel ''Looking Backward," set in a Boston of the year 2000, it sold half a million copies. Never mind the futuristic inventions (electric lighting, credit cards) and visionary city planning; what readers responded to was the transformation of a Gilded Age city of labor strikes and social unrest into a socialist utopia (Bellamy called it ''nationalist") of full employment and material abundance.  <<read more>>

The Way We Were by William Flesch
Why are adult readers so drawn to children's literature? A lavish new Norton anthology suggests some answers. Children's literature is big business, as J.K. Rowling's phenomenal success makes clear. To be big business, it has to appeal to adults, since even if we think we're buying it for our children and not ourselves, we buy them what we can imagine loving, often what we ourselves once loved, and even love still.  But the publication of the new "Norton Anthology of Children's Literature"-a volume as gorgeous as the wonders it promises its readers, both child and adult-reminds us of a melancholy truth about growing up: Our adult delight in children's literature is not an innocent delight. As adult readers of children's stories, we're aware, as children are not, that their robust confidence in the world, at least while they are enraptured by a story, is ephemeral and fragile, endangered by every step they take toward adulthood. For us, the child becomes almost another character in the story, responding with a wonderfully heedless delight or dismay to things as unreal as the adult world she imagines. But we know what's coming, how evanescent the child's world is-and we feel for her what she cannot possibly feel for herself. <<read more>>
 

Tome Improvement: William T. Vollmann's Real World by James Gibbons

In the stock market we call literature, the best anthologies pay hefty dividends. It's hard to imagine Faulkner's ascendancy as Nobel Prize winner and "American Shakespeare" without the catalyst of Malcolm Cowley's Portable Faulkner—as William Styron recalled, the introduction to the collection, issued in 1945, "opened up Faulkner's world for me when I was a very young man struggling to read a difficult writer who was then out of print, little known and less understood." Few writers have been blessed with as beneficent an intervention as Cowley's, which, luckily for Faulkner, occurred just as Americans were beginning to get curious about modernism's intriguing formal innovations. And The Portable Faulkner remains the gold standard for single-author anthologies because, as Styron's remark indicates, an audience's willingness to grapple with the complexities of a difficult writer isn't enough; the work needs to be "opened up," to be made accessible and intelligible without diminishing the allure of its mysteries, and that is precisely what Cowley achieved in his collection. <<read more>>
 

You're a Winner! by Joseph Epstein

Prizes are nice, but they don't say anything about the quality of your achievements.  I am all for literary and cultural prizes, and, uncomplicated truth to tell, I only wish that more of them came to me. Thus far too few have. I don't see many more in my future either, unless, like Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg and Frank Lloyd Wright, I acquire a fair amount of flowing white hair and live well into my 80s, at which point, I gather, what are considered reactionary and even stupid opinions are no longer held against you. <<read more>>

Holmes and His Commentators by Theodore Dalrymple

According to Hazlitt, if we wish to know the force of human genius, we have only to read Shakespeare, but if we wish to know the futility of human learning, we have only to read his commentators. Something similar might almost be said —almost, but not quite—of Sherlock Holmes and his commentators. The gulf is not nearly as great as that between Shakespeare and his critics, of course, but if literary genius is required in order to create a mythological world that is more real and alluring to readers than any reality itself, that once read is never forgotten, that for a century has inspired the devotion of the literary and the unliterary unlike, and that is vastly and innocently entertaining without being wholly devoid of instruction, then Conan Doyle had such genius to a very considerable degree. <<read more>>

Breakfast with Brontosaurus, An interview with Harold Bloom by Ieva Lesinska

Harold Bloom has only three criteria for whether a work should be read and taught: aesthetic splendor, cognitive power, and wisdom.

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The Myth of Mythology by Karen Armstrong

Legends aren’t supposed to be history; they are an understanding of what it means to be human. We forget them at our peril.  <<read more>>

Why Americans Can't Write Political Fiction, an essay by Christopher Lehmann

Whatever its many other deficiencies, American political reality has often seemed tailor-made for fictionalizing. Just consider the rich welter of issues and personalities that hover around our present-day national politics: Congress' special session on the Terri Schiavo case; the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans ads; the ongoing agons of the Valerie Plame case and the 9/11 commissions. We have a born-again dauphin commander-in-chief striving in countless ways to surpass his father's wan patrician legacy and usually failing. We have Justice Sundays, the Cindy Sheehan vigil, and the America Supports You Freedom Walk—events that beg for adaptation as low farce or high satire.  Or, dare one say it, literature. <<read more>>

Imagine a World without Copyright by Joost Smiers and Marieke van Schijndel

Copyright was once a means to guarantee artists a decent income. Aside from the question as to whether it ever actually functioned as such - most artists never made a penny from the copyright system - we have to admit that copyright serves an altogether different purpose in the contemporary world. It now is the tool that conglomerates in the music, publishing, imaging and movie industries use to control their markets.  <<read more>>
 

A Masterpiece in Miniature by Adam Thirlwell

Anthony Briggs claims Leo Tolstoy is comparatively easy to translate. Adam Thirlwell is a little suspicious of his version of War and Peace. 

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Survival of the Fittest Characters by Denis Dutton

Human nature, evolved over millions of years and present in our genes, expresses itself not only in bedrooms, boardrooms, and battlefields but in creative human pursuits, including literature. This, anyway, is the premise of an amusing, if over-ambitious, book by psychologist/zoologist David P. Barash and his college-student daughter, Nanelle.  <<read more>>

Melville: His World and Work by Andrew DelBanco reviewed by Michael Dirda

Herman Melville turns out to be the big one that almost got away.  The life and afterlife of Herman Melville (1819-1891) present the greatest illustration in American literature, perhaps in world literature, of the Psalm "The same stone which the builders refused is become the head-stone." After the popular success of Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), which led to the young Melville being dubbed "the man who lived among cannibals," he embarked on a literary career that went gradually, then precipitously, downhill. By the time he was 40 he had essentially abandoned fiction altogether, tried publishing poetry with comparable success (i.e., none), and finally resigned himself -- he was, after all, married, with four children and debts -- to spending the rest of his life as a customs inspector for the city of New York. When he died, the newspaper obituary misprinted his name as "Henry Melville." <<read more>>

The Sweet Smell of Provenance by Richard W. Oram and Edward L. Bishop

A characteristic item found in libraries' special collections is the so-called association copy, a book whose significance derives from its connection with a well-known writer, artist, or historical figure. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin is legendary for owning no fewer than 34 of the 1,000 copies of the first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, many of which are association copies. <<read more>>

In Praise of the Novel by Carlos Fuentes
Author Carlos Fuentes on Cervantes, Kafka, and the saving grace of literature.  <<read more>>

Campus Follies by Elaine Showalter

Why is the academic novel my favourite literary genre? Maybe it's just narcissistic pleasure. One theory about the rise of the novel argues that it developed because readers like to read about their own world, and indeed about themselves.  <<read more>>

Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and its Discontents by Elaine Showalter reviewed by D.J. Taylor

Arguably the most significant thing about Zadie Smith's On Beauty, whose subject might be summarised as "what it means to be a liberal in the 21st century", is that it is set on and around the campus of a small liberal arts college on the north-eastern American seaboard. Not only do some ghosts from a rather outmoded tradition in the mod-ern English novel suddenly twitch with phantom life (it can hardly be coincidence that the chief male character shares a first name with The History Man's Howard Kirk), but the reader senses that the background chose itself, so to speak: that Smith realised at an early stage that the university offered an A-grade setting for the kind of moral-cum-intellectual issues she wanted to explore.

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Out of the Ashes by James Wood
James Wood salutes Blake Bailey's generous biography of Richard Yates, A Tragic Honesty.  <<read more>>
 

CSI: Baker Street by Richard A. Posner

Edmund Wilson once said that "the reading of detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles." <<read more>>

Brief Encounters by William Boyd

Anton Chekhov reinvented the short story: a century on, the form is enjoying another renaissance. William Boyd explores its attraction for writers - and proposes a new system of classification.  <<read more>>

Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog by Kitty Burns Florey
Diagramming sentences is one of those lost skills, like darning socks or playing the sackbut, that no one seems to miss. <<read more>>

Truth or Dare: On History and Fiction

"Common-place" asks Suzanne Lebsock, Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University and author of A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial (New York, 2003), winner of the 2004 Francis Parkman Prize, what’s at stake in writing history that is meant to read like fiction. <<read more>>
 

The I's Have It:  At 72, John Updike Still Hasn't Run Out Of Things to Write About . . . John Updike by Linton Weeks
An amiable sun shines down. Clad in khakis, plaid sports jacket and a crayon-yellow turtleneck, Updike, arguably among the most talented living writers in the world, has a toothy smile on his red face. His hair is gray-white. He is amused: At the past. At the present. At the country. At long races. At short stories. At human foibles of all colors. But most of all Updike is amused at his amusement. He is endlessly fascinated by his own self, which he has explored and exploited in more than 50 books in the past 50 years. <<read more>>
 

Salmon, Trees, Cancer: A Primer - How to Write a Great Northwest Novel by Ryan Boudinot

Hello, Northwest writers! As an avid reader and lifelong resident of the Evergreen State, I'd like to share some tips on how to distill the essence of our region in your fiction. By following my 10 easy tips, you'll be able to write a bestseller that captures the spirit of this awesome part of the country. Let's get started!  <<read more>>

Signature Collection by Lawrence Block

Last summer I spent six weeks at the Ragdale writers' colony. I worked all day every day and came home with a novel, The Burglar on the Prowl. I gave it to my agent, and he gave it to my editor and the book was designed and the cover prepared, and on March 16, just two weeks ago as I write this, the book went on sale nationwide.  <<read more>>

The Literary Life: The Honorable Menace...James T Farrell's raucous, brilliant, and (not really) neoconnish life by Scott McLemee
In 1954, James T. Farrell published a collection of essays called Reflections at Fifty. It is long since out of print, like most of his novels and, so far as I can tell, all of his nonfiction volumes. Digging it out now, Reflections is a reminder of what the author of Studs Lonigan was like -- or rather, of how he wished to present himself -- halfway to his centennial, which we mark this year. <<read more>>
 

Light But Sound by John Banville
20 years on, John Banville returns to the Czech Republic's most famous fictional export, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.  <<read more>>

Windmills of the Mind by A.S. Byatt

As Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote is published, AS Byatt considers the influence of Cervantes' masterpiece on the development of the modern novel.  <<read more>>

Theory in Chaos by David Kirby
Viewing literature through the lens of some "ism" seemed revolutionary in the 1960s. Today, many are calling it an irrelevant approach... [T]heory's impact on the study of literature in the US has been pervasive if nothing else. Large numbers of the last two generations of English majors have been instructed not to experience novels and poems directly, but rather to view them through the lens of some kind of theory - Marxism being one of the most popular.  The idea was to move away from viewing literature as having any innate "truth" of its own, and rather to study it in relationship to larger schools of thought. But the approach left many students complaining they spent more class time with dry theoreticians than with the great authors they had hoped to encounter.  Today, however, such complaints may be on their way out.  (Yay! -stc)  <<read more>>

The Tyranny of Copyright? by Robert S. Boynton
Last fall, a group of civic-minded students at Swarthmore College received a sobering lesson in the future of political protest. They had come into possession of some 15,000 e-mail messages and memos -- presumably leaked or stolen -- from Diebold Election Systems, the largest maker of electronic voting machines in the country. The memos featured Diebold employees' candid discussion of flaws in the company's software and warnings that the computer network was poorly protected from hackers. In light of the chaotic 2000 presidential election, the Swarthmore students decided that this information shouldn't be kept from the public. Like aspiring Daniel Ellsbergs with their would-be Pentagon Papers, they posted the files on the Internet, declaring the act a form of electronic whistle-blowing.  <<read more>>

Hesperus Readers Must Be Accompanied by a Minor by Carlin Romano

What  is that happy cliché of literary criticism, a "minor" work? Surely not, prima facie, a work by a minor writer, since we're told major writers produce their share. Yet if major writers produce minor works without losing their mark of heaven, doesn't fairness dictate that minor writers can produce major works without losing their stigmata?  <<read more>>

Tales of the unexpected by Galen Strawson
The idea of the self as something wholly constructed out of the narratives we create about our lives has become a staple across the humanities. But it's utter nonsense, says Galen Strawson, considering Making Stories by Jerome Bruner.  According to the distinguished psychologist and psychiatrist Jerry Bruner, "self is a perpetually rewritten story."  We are all constantly engaged in "self-making narrative" and "in the end we become the autobiographical narratives by which we 'tell about' our lives."<<read more>>
 

It's All About Me, Especially the Ugly Parts by Bruce Weber
Let's face it, the impulse to spill the beans about ourselves is a potent one. We're all ashamed of something or other; we all have secrets that don't want to be secrets, unspoken thoughts pressing on our vocal cords. Especially now, in a culture that rewards self-aggrandizement (I mean, please, Donald Trump is still a celebrity?) to such a warped degree that some people find even their most grotesquely squalid distinctions aggrandizable. Jerry Springer and Montel Williams would not be household names if that weren't so.  << read more>>

The Book-Person's Vision by 2Blowhards

If the movie-world view is all about the vital connections between art and trash, and about how each is the lifeblood of the other, the book person's imagination is taken up with the neverending struggle of art, talent and brains to triumph over the forces of money, hustle and fame. <<read more>>

The Populist Manifesto, Bestseller Stephen King Raises High The Banner of Middlebrow Fiction by Linton Weeks

Great literature is like pornography: You know it when you see it. <<read more>>

Party-boy Advocate for "Moral" Fiction by Carlin Romano

During the glory days of John Gardner in the late '70s, the pipe-smoking, flamboyantly white-maned medievalist regularly provoked fellow American novelists to joust over the nature of literary fiction as if it were the Vietnam War, and mattered just as much.  <<read more>>
 

William Faulkner's Southern Draw: "The Reivers" by Jonathan Yardley
In all of American literature there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to compare with the life's work of William Faulkner. From beginning to end his achievement is at an extraordinarily high level, sustained over nearly four decades, leaving us a half dozen indisputable masterpieces -- "The Sound and the Fury," "As I Lay Dying," "Light in August," "Absalom, Absalom!," "The Hamlet," "Go Down, Moses" -- as well as many other books of singular merit. Simply and incontrovertibly, Faulkner stands alone. <<read more>>

In the River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks

"Time," says Jorge Luis Borges, "is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river...." Our movements, our actions, are extended in time, as are our perceptions, our thoughts, the contents of consciousness. We live in time, we organize time, we are time creatures through and through. But is the time we live in, or live by, continuous —like Borges's river? Or is it more comparable to a chain or a train, a succession of discrete moments, like beads on a string? <<read more>>

No Mark of Distinction by Jennifer Jacobson
Some publishers and scholars want to purge the colon from book titles; the only thing that's worse: semicolons.  <<read more>>
 

Love in the Personals by Catherine Keenan
Between the wit, bluntness, desperation and deceit, some say the personals ad has become a new art form. Others prefer to sit back and enjoy the brilliant lies for what they are. <<read more>>

Strained Relations by Howard Jacobson
The family has always preoccupied writers. But reading and writing are solitary activities and great literature reflects a timeless desire to escape domestic ties.  <<read more>>
 

Nobel lecture by J.M. Coetzee

Boston, on the coast of Lincolnshire, is a handsome town, writes his man. The tallest church steeple in all of England is to be found there; sea-pilots use it to navigate by. Around Boston is fen country. Bitterns abound, ominous birds who give a heavy, groaning call loud enough to be heard two miles away, like the report of a gun. <<read more>>

Literature Teaching Us About Life, and vice versa by David P. Barash

For too long we have been encouraged to see culture as an affair of intellect, and reading as a solitary exercise. But the truth is different: literature and art are pathways of feeling, and our encounter with them is social, inscribing us in a larger community; a community composed of buried selves and loved ones, as well as the fellowship of writers over time. Literature and art provide intercourse of a unique sort. Through art we discover that we are not alone… That picture of connectedness, of a universe that is umbilical and strange - a picture that no camera can take - takes the measure of our true lives. << read more>>

The Knight in the Mirror by Harold Bloom

Don Quixote - the first modern novel - remains the finest. As a new translation of the Spanish classic is published, Harold Bloom argues that only Shakespeare comes close to Cervantes' genius.  <<read more>>
 

Texas for Cretins by Michael Lind

Don't be too hard on the Booker jury. They've democratised literature by proving that a book doesn't have to be any good to win a prize, so long as it exploits socially acceptable national and ethnic stereotypes.  <<read more>>

Pay attention:it's important!  by Oliver Pritchett

I have always had a great affection for the semicolon; it has a certain discreet charm. On the other hand, there is just one word to describe the colon: bossy. A colon says: "Pay attention, this next bit is really important." If the colon is a fanfare, the semicolon is more like a polite cough. It is a nasty shock to discover that it has enemies. Gertrude Stein, who might, in her time, have been considered a bit of a bossyboots herself, suggested that semicolons were simply commas with pretensions.  <<read more>>

Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books by Umberto Eco

The city of Alexandria played host on 1 November to the renowned Italian novelist and scholar Umberto Eco, who gave a lecture in English, on varieties of literary and geographic memory, at the newly opened Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Al-Ahram Weekly publishes the complete text of the lecture. 

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Don of a New Era: "The sloppiest masterpiece in existence" gets translated -- for the umpteenth time by Ian Garrick Mason

As one of the foundation stones of modern literature -- "It has been said that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote," wrote Lionel Trilling -- it is natural that we should continue to treasure and reprint this classic.  <<read more>>

Can't Write?  Don't Write by David Sexton

No other book is quite so completely and utterly worthless as a mediocre novel.  A mediocre guide to trees or to cheese can have its uses for those who don't have anything better on the subject to hand.  A history book or biography, however dull, contains some facts that may prove handy to somebody one day.  Atlases, dictionaries, anthologies and instruction manuals, however uninspired, all have some little utility.  But a lifeless novel has no value whatsoever. <<read more>>

Commence Skimming: Start Reading Now.  Or Whatever.  by Jim Walsh

Much has been made of the dumbing-down of newspapers and magazines in this age of computers and television, but the main thing that gets my, and apparently only my, goat is the mass encroachment of subheads on the written word. <<read more>>

Long Story Short by Laura Miller

In the book business, conventional wisdom has it that short stories don't sell. True, at least once a year a (usually young) author produces a collection to high acclaim and respectable sales. This year, it's Nell Freudenberger's ''Lucky Girls,'' last year it was Adam Haslett's ''You Are Not a Stranger Here'' and before that, it was Jhumpa Lahiri's ''Interpreter of Maladies.'' Nathan Englander's ''For the Relief of Unbearable Urges'' has become a veritable touchstone for every editor trying to persuade his or her employer to take a chance on a book of stories. Still, most editors will only acquire a short-story collection when it comes contractually attached to a novel. <<read more>>

Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to J.M. Coetzee of South Africa by Scott Mclemee

The 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to John Maxwell Coetzee, a white South African novelist and essayist whose work chronicles the inner history of his country's transformation from racial dictatorship to a post-apartheid society. While acknowledging Mr. Coetzee's literary craft, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in an announcement this morning, particularly emphasized his "ruthless criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of Western civilization" -- a remark with international political overtones, no doubt intended to resonate beyond the strictly cultural sphere. <<read more>>      <<and more>>     <<and more>>     <<and more>>     <<and still more>> 

The Next Culture Wars by Eli Noam

As broadband internet spreads around the world, television distribution over the new medium moves from experimentation to commercial possibility. The question then arises of whether this medium will be dominated by US content, as film and television have been. Will TV over the internet be American?  <<read more>>

The Great Books Workout by Laura Miller

An Englishman once told me that although he was shocked at how poorly educated the average American is, he considered the self-educated among us to be the best-read people he'd ever met. His statement might have been engineered to satisfy two contradictory stateside penchants: our persistent, self-flagellating faith in the superior sophistication of Europeans and our conviction that if we set our minds and most of our spare time to it, we can remake ourselves into savants. <<read more>>

Fiction and the little true facts by Edmund White

Writing need not have a clear political message or erupt into slogans in order to exert a subtle political power over us. When we read historical fiction (or fiction of any sort) we are in search of an experience, not a paraphrasable idea. We can only laugh when we read in a recent historical novel about the encounter between the schoolgirl Fanny Skynner and William Wordsworth.  <<read more>>

Someone needs to have a word with Amis by Tibor Fischer
Usually, when you make a decision in life, unless you have access to parallel universes, you can't truly judge how right that decision was. You were happy to go and live in Rio de Janeiro, but who knows, maybe you would have been happier if you had stayed in London. <<read more>>

Post-Post Dementia: How Contemporary American Poets Are Denaturing the Poem, Part VII by Joan Houlihan

Fence, an aptly named journal of "new writing" lives by its name and keeps things away—in this case, it keeps meaning away from the reader. It is also a journal with well-made, edgy covers (the current issue depicts someone suited up to remove bio-hazardous material or to combat a bio-terror threat), upscale art, good quality paper stock and sharp layout—it even offers “Cryptic T-shirts.” Its electronic sibling, Slope, advertising itself as the place “Where Movements Happen”, is an equally up-to-the-minute product with its distressed-style logo and high-techy, industrial-look covers. Slope serves up an international flavor, “publishing poetry from cultures around the world” and also runs extremely hip poetry contests like the current National American Sign Language Poetry Prize.  <<read more>>

What Use Is Literature? by Myron Magnet

Aristotle perhaps didn’t go far enough when he said that tragedy was more philosophic than history, concentrating as it does on what might be rather than merely on what had been. He might have gone on to say that tragedy—or, more broadly, literature—is more philosophic even than philosophy. It is a form of knowledge that draws on all our ways of knowing, rather than on ratiocination alone. And it is a more intense form of knowledge, since, unlike philosophy, it isn’t constantly taking its own pulse, or checking its instruments, anxiously asking itself how it can know this or that. As Dickens would say, it just goes and knows it. <<read more>>

What about me? by Robert Fulford

Two authors under one roof almost invariable creates professional envy.  Zelda Fitzgerald's partisans insist that her literary career was thwarted by her husband, Scott. In the 1920s he was her wary mentor, encouraging her to write, but he sold her first stories under his name because it brought a better price. Later they shared the credit for her work, but that left her still a junior partner. When finally she wrote independently about their marriage, notably in her novel Save Me the Waltz, he claimed she was stealing material that was rightly his. Chronic mental illness weakened her case, so her writing received little serious attention until, decades after her death, feminist critics took her up.  <<read more>>   <<still more>>

The Final Irony by Zoe Williams

Harry Potter and The Meaning of Life by Jennie Bristow

Once upon a time, it was record shops that staged high-profile midnight openings to sell the latest hot release to queues of impatient fans; it was senior politicians who found themselves grilled on national TV by the BBC's flagship interviewer Jeremy Paxman; and it was intellectuals and literary novelists who shaped great debates about moral values, social structures and our essential humanity. <<read more>>  More on Harry Potter: "Breaking the Spell" by Charles McGrath.

Tacit Knowledge -- Writing a Book by 2Blowhards
Isn't it interesting how many people dream of writing a book? It's sweet, and it's (mostly) harmless, and I guess I once semi-shared that dream, and I guess one or two brain cells still make room for the possibility that I will someday write a book (fat chance). But, but, but ... Then I followed the book-publishing industry for 15 years. <<read more>>

Poetry and the Politics of Self-Expression by Barney F. McClelland

Some years ago, a mentor of mine put forth the argument: “Would you try to build a cabinet when you did not posses even the rudimentary woodworking skills or knowledge of the tools necessary to build the cabinet? Of course not, then why do so many people think they can write poetry without an iota of preparation?”  Still, many do.  <<read more>>

Doting husbands and sugar daddies: Some great female writers have had male muses. Lucky them, says Anne Roiphe

At least a part of Virginia Woolf's mythic reputation lies in the loyal devotion of her husband Leonard. Gertrude Stein had Alice B, but the role of muse is hardly one that every little boy aspires to. Crazy, drunken, male writers, no matter how ugly, old and ill-tempered, will always find a willing girl to mop up the morning after, but females given to bouts of depression, nightmares and long manuscripts that take precedence over dinner will not so often find a willing muse to hold the pot roast. <<read more>>

The Truth About Plagiarism by Richard A. Posner

Plagiarism can be a form of fraud, but it is no accident that, unlike real theft, it is not a crime. If a thief steals your car, you are out the market value of the car; but if a writer copies material from a book you wrote, you don't have to replace the book. At worst, the undetected plagiarist obtains a reputation that he does not deserve (that is the element of fraud in plagiarism). The real victim of his fraud is not the person whose work he copies, but those of his competitors who scruple to enhance their own reputations by such means.  <<read more>>

Books in a Tube by Laura Miller

Television and books -- it sounds like a match made in limbo, and it's true that watching most American television programming about books feels like a long wait in a small airport. Author interviews have been TV's only reliable way to convey one of the chief pleasures of reading, that sense of being caught up in a great conversation. But not all great authors are good talkers, and literary types of any sort are increasingly hard to find on talk shows. <<read more>>

The New Scholarship of Comics by Paul Buhle
The late historian-philosopher C.L.R. James enjoyed quoting Hegel's aphorism that the old man repeats the nightly prayer of his childhood -- but with a lifetime of experience. James, my intellectual inspiration for decades (and the subject of my earliest biographical volume), was doubtless speaking of himself as well. Today, students who come to a campus with Spider-Man on their minds may have trouble believing it, but they share the superhero with middle-aged professors. For, in our scholarly lives, many of us are not just harking back to distant memories of the Marvel comics of our childhoods, but creating a new scholarship on the comic book and the comic strip. <<read more>>
 

The News From Poetry by Margo Jefferson

We have just left National Poetry Month behind. All the better to honor poetry in May. The best way to honor an art -- or an ethnic group or a sex -- that has its own history month is to pay attention 12 months a year.

When do we most need poetry? I know how much I've needed it these last months as the world pressed in with such lethal ugliness. Poets are like aerialists: the wire they walk stretches from history to eternity, fact to dream, language to silence. When they get across we feel rapture. They've taken us with them. <<read more>>

The Serious Business of Literature by Kate Jennings

The boom of the 1990s now feels exactly like Dylan's song: a dream, a vacuum and a scheme. But the hangover from those years could not be more real, giving the markets splitting headaches and fall-down dizzy spells: Witness, most recently, the $1.4-billion settlement finalized last month between investment banks and securities regulators. If financial people read more contemporary fiction that reflected their world, I've often wondered, would they be wiser about their motives and less likely to repeat their mistakes, repeat the cycle? And would we understand them better, rather than just labeling anyone in a suit as greedy?  <<read more>>
 

The Sound of One Wing Flapping: The Art of the Poetry Blurb 

How Contemporary American Poets are Denaturing the Poem,  Part VI  by Joan Houlihan

Trying to compare the blurbs on a book of poetry to the contents is like trying to compare a description of angel wings to actual angel wings. The blurbs employ extravagantly unverifiable descriptions of the contents (what is “intensely somatic”? a “one-hundred ring verbal circus?” who says it’s “brilliant” and why?) to contents that are themselves indescribable. How do you determine the accuracy of a description of the indescribable?  <<read more>>