Oscar Wilde may have forsworn a life as “a dried-up Oxford don,” but his classics training in tragedy, syllogism, and rhetorical style made itself felt in his writing, says Daniel Mendelsohn.
Elaine Showalter is surprised so few reviewers of Philip Roth’s Nemesis have mentioned that it’s “a brilliant and compassionate American re-imagining of Albert Camus’s The Plague.” (Via.)
Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary collects the notes he wrote after his mother’s death. Dwight Garner says its “unvarnished quality is the source of its wrecking cumulative power.”
“[W]ithin the cage of this bloated, earnest would-be Great American Novel, there might be a leaner, funnier, better one beating its wings to get out.” — Kate Christensen, in Elle (print only), on Freedom