I used to fall in love with a book and then devour the rest of the author’s work in the space of two weeks. I stopped doing this in my twenties when I ran through Walker Percy’s novels, first to last, after picking up The Moviegoer on the advice of a friend. I ended up nauseous with boredom behind a . . .
Week before last I wondered how my friend Terry Teachout, H.L. Mencken biographer, would respond to Colin Burrow’s assertion that there are “two respects in which literary biography is intrinsically pernicious, however well it’s done.” (“The first,” says Burrow, “is that literary biographies need a thesis in order to catch the headlines. This can turn what ought to be a . . .
I’m obsessed with the eerie scenes in my friend Michael’s Forest Series — the Pixel Trunks and Potholes, especially. And Forest #4 (Three Dee), pictured above, strikes me as something that could’ve sprung right out of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s imagination. This hellish thicket, like the forest Young Goodman Brown wanders, might be an external landscape, but is more likely an internal . . .
James Wolcott — whose scathing political posts I’ve admired here and elsewhere — takes on Caitlin Flanagan, she of the Inner Housewife, Strawfeminist, and other action figures, in the current New Republic. I’ve already devoted too much space and stomach acid to Ms. Flanagan, so I’ll just say that I think Wolcott gives her actual writing too much credit. He . . .
My review of Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones appeared in Newsday this weekend. Here’s an excerpt: Aminatta Forna made peace with Sierra Leone, the homeland she fled as a girl, by reconstructing the most terrible memories of her childhood, and then digging deeper. She investigated the execution of her finance minister father for treason — he was sentenced to hanging when . . .