The Age of the Listicle
by John WilsonFrom a book on missionaries in the U.S. to espionage fiction, these are novels that should be on your list. Continue Reading »
Christ-Like Holden Caulfield
by Lee SiegelWhen I recently ventured to say to an old acquaintance of mine, an academic mandarin who teaches literature at an elite university, that The Catcher in the Rye was a profound work of art, he smiled gregariously as if about to relish a shared ironic joke, then gazed at me with slowly . . . . Continue Reading »
A Brutal Cosmos
by Jonathan ClarkeCormac McCarthy seems firmly established as a canonical American novelist, but it may be several decades before we determine the precise nature of his achievement. His career has taken an odd shape. His early, Faulknerian novels, set in his native Tennessee, bore ample evidence of his talent but . . . . Continue Reading »
A Theology of Fiction
by Cassandra NelsonA spirited debate has been going on for nearly a decade now, much of it in these pages, about the apparent dearth of religious ideas in recent American fiction. Because many of the interlocutors—among the most prominent are Paul Elie, Randy Boyagoda, Dana Gioia, and Gregory . . . . Continue Reading »
America’s Search for Social Utopia
by Miles SmithAs Hawthorne knew, the iconoclastic impulse is ultimately ungovernable. In his story and in our own historical moment, the would-be societal purifiers’ appetite for destruction proves to be insatiable. Continue Reading »
A Practical Guide To Reading Well
by Mark BauerleinRobert DiYanni joins the podcast to discuss his new book, You Are What You Read: A Practical Guide To Reading Well. Continue Reading »
An American Epic
by Mark BauerleinMark Edmundson joins the podcast to discuss his recent book, Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy. Continue Reading »
At Home on Revolutionary Road
by Peter TonguetteOne of the hoariest clichés of American popular culture is anti-suburban sentiment. Common throughout literature, film, and television, it arguably received its most tuneful expression in Malvina Reynolds’s 1962 song “Little Boxes,” which disparages the tracts of affordable housing that were . . . . Continue Reading »
Lamb to the Slaughter
by Samuel GoldmanGeorge Frazier had a story about the first time he met John O’Hara. The journalist and clotheshorse Frazier was introduced to the novelist O’Hara while hanging out at a Greenwich Village jazz club. The famously cranky O’Hara looked Frazier up and down before inviting him to have a drink. . . . . Continue Reading »
Cheever's God
by Matthew SchmitzReaders of John Cheever’s stories, most of which appeared in the New Yorker before being collected in a Pulitzer-winning book in 1978, regarded the author as “the Ovid of Ossining,” the artist who showed the riches and wonders of suburban life. Alert to the transcendent in the . . . . Continue Reading »
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