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John Wilson
There was, and still is today, a photo of Sinyavsky on one of my bookshelves. Continue Reading »
What follows is a historical footnote on the Catholic fiction debate.
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Why do so many books on the Apostle Paul appear every year? Continue Reading »
A reader has a special relationship with a living writer whose books he or she has been reading as they appeared over the years. Continue Reading »
In his inaugural First Things web column, John Wilson shares his favorite books about baseball. Continue Reading »
We suffer nowadays from a surfeit of literary anniversaries. One blurs into the next until we begin to long for a moratorium. And yet even so, a few such occasions are welcome. The 150th anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland yielded a splendid array of exhibitions, lectures, and books, . . . . Continue Reading »
The books of 2014, like the books of any year, utterly exceed our grasp. In one aspect, they suggest (they mimic, we could say) the divinely gratuitous excess of Creation; seen from another angle, their multiplicity reflects our fallenness, our propensity to error, our confusion. We need to hold . . . . Continue Reading »
In the month since Ray Bradbury died at the age of 91, a host of tributes have appeared, touching on almost every salient aspect of his long life and his exceptionally many-sided work. Yet one theme worthy of attention, so it seems to me, has been largely ignored. “Largely,” I say”not entirely… . Continue Reading »
Ah, the books of 2008: Who can number them? All About the Beat and The Art of the Public Grovel; American Earth and American Pests; The Lost Spy and The Terminal Spy. This was the year of Original Sin and The Forever War and a great wall of books about China. Fiction? Palace Council and Moscow . . . . Continue Reading »
The Right Attitude to Rain by alexander mccall smith pantheon, 288 pages, $21.95 Hard to believe that, only a handful of years ago, the name Alexander McCall Smith would have drawn a blank among American readers. An African-born academic in Scotland who specializes in medical law and frequently . . . . Continue Reading »
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