Micah Mattix

Rod Dreher  linked  to  my piece on Gogol  yesterday, and we got to discussing the difference between people who like Austen and those who like Russian novels. In an email, I suggested: In my experience, Austen fans love her because of the detailed character portraits, the . . . . Continue Reading »

Over at  Books & Culture , John Wilson offers his books of the year . I love John’s methodology: the best books are those that first come to mind after a year of reading. Here are a couple of the more interesting titles: Apricot Jam: And Other Stories . Aleksandr . . . . Continue Reading »

All Russian writers, it has often seemed to me, are at once wonderfully and disturbingly foreign. The dark, snow-encrusted landscapes of Pasternak somehow both reflect and drown the human heart. The nearly inscrutable evil of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment finds its counterpart in the absurd innocence of the Prince in The Idiot. Chekhov’s uncanniness captures modern man’s bewilderment, and Tolstoy’s complex realism, life’s uncanny and often tragic consistencies… . Continue Reading »

New Criterion art critic James Panero has curated what looks to be an interesting exhibition of portraits of injured U.S. service personnel. Too often artists use military injuries or deaths as mere fodder for the next piece of political art. That’s not the case here . The exhibit will run . . . . Continue Reading »

We will be screening Walker Percy: A Documentary Film at Houston Baptist University tomorrow night. I’ll be giving a brief introduction to Percy before the film and would love to meet any fellow readers of First Things . The screening is free and open to the public. It begins at 8:30 p.m. in . . . . Continue Reading »

April is National Poetry Month in the United States, and to be honest, I am somewhat ambivalent about the whole thing. National months have one of two purposes: Either they call attention to often ignored causes or products or they attempt to atone for past sins… . Continue Reading »

I’m not a big fan of purely political art, but the Pratt Institute has no problem with it—as long as it’s the right kind of politics, that is.  The New Criterion’ s James Panero  reports : You don’t have to be an art critic to see something tasteless going on . . . . Continue Reading »

In his new film, Walker Percy: A Documentary Film, Win Riley offers a touching, nuanced portrait of Percy, the great Catholic novelist and philosopher. Deftly alternating between interviews with friends and scholars, narration, photographs, and original video recordings … Continue Reading »

Hamlet was sane when he stabbed Polonius according to a court in California . Justice Anthony M. Kennedy presided. While the court was unable to reach a unanimous decision, ten out twelve jurors “believed Hamlet to be sane, thus able to be held criminally culpable.” . . . . Continue Reading »

In today’s online article at Books & Culture , Marcus Goodyear explains a new poetry game on Twitter where poets tweet lines of poetry on a particular topic in an effort to outwit each other. The purpose, Goodyear remarks, is to remind us that poetry is fun: In the end, Tweet Speak Poetry . . . . Continue Reading »