Has the American novel abandoned God?
Our literary life today speaks of a crisis of faith
Books
Tuesday
A haunting novel remembers 1990s Ukraine
Explored commonalities between Ukraine and Russia have since erupted into war
Tuesday
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at 100
A century after its first publication, the poem still defies easy categorization
A Joycean odyssey
In search of the Irish author’s Swiss resting place
Monday
Evelyn Waugh’s sincerest form of flattery
He had a major but unsung inspiration: the now-neglected novelist William Gerhardie
Mary Gaitskill and the body electric
Why do we find the dark side of sexuality so terrifying?
Thursday
Books you should plan to read this fall
The temperature might have soared but there’s plenty of good lit to look forward to
Thursday
Falling in line with Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt is both a prophecy and a warning for America in the next century
Monday
Et in Arcadia ego
Interwar Oxford was less a world of dreaming spires and more one of constipated poets
Standing with J.K. Rowling
A certain sector of the Harry Potter fandom has decided that the author is the devil incarnate
Stop reading
Literacy is overrated
Friday
Who’s ready for another Biden family memoir?
Because the president’s little sister is giving us one regardless
Thursday
Waugh in Hollywood
Seventy-five years ago, Evelyn Waugh headed to Hollywood to sell Brideshead Revisited
Femmes fatales in fiction and life
American literature is intensely preoccupied with the beautiful female psychopath
Dirty realists
The beauty of dirty realism is that it captures regular life in all its stupefying, and sometimes transcendent, malaise
Sunday
On receiving books in the mail
E-commerce is great for readers, but there’s no wrong way to buy books
Sunday
I’m a Latinx person of letters
The POC victim narrative is a systemic problem
Succeeding at failing
Failure is not a learning experience; it’s a humiliating and hurtful experience
Monday
Getting the jokes in Proust
A dismaying number of Proust readers don’t realize it’s supposed to be funny
Reading gaol
Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison by Daniel Genis reviewed