MINDFUL PLEASURES

I can agree with Clive James' general definition of humanism while disagreeing with the fogeyish particulars of his argument in Cultural...

Damn it. I just did it again. As is my wont, after telling myself not to do something (in this case, writing yet another "brief eulog...

In Claudia Roth Pierpont's lucid, informative and sympathetic Roth Unbound , the titular boundless one is quoted as saying that if he we...

The polymathic writer, critic, and translator Guy Davenport (whose essay "That Faire Field of Enna " (in The Geography of the Imag...

Steve Erickson is one weird dude. I mean, of course, the implied author of his novels and not the actual LA-living, movie-reviewing, flesh-a...

Martin Amis doesn't appear to have spent much time on Lionel Asbo . It's a slight, careless, phoned-in performance that shuffles dis...

We best remember a writer by reading him. And by thinking about what we've read. And arguing with it in our heads. Gass was a sentence...

The compulsively quotable William Howard Gass, American author and word magician (and, in the interstices of that vocation, a professional p...

Adorno's Optimism ... Yes, it sounds like the title of a book thinner than Trump on Kant or When Coetzee Smiles or Complex Sentences in...

Colson Whitehead's fine first novel, The Intuitionist , announced the arrival of an impressive allegorical imagination. Here was a worth...

Like Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex (a novel with which it otherwise contrasts in virtually every way), Edward P. Jones's The Known W...

I don't like Richard Ford. Don't like the novels, and probably wouldn' t like the guy. If I met him tomorrow I'd hock a loog...

Largely owing to the second word in its title, linguistic relic of a much more racist time, this novel is rarely read today, and that fact i...

On the title page of my Penguin Classics edition of The Confidence Man , an earlier reader, who might not have been myself at the time, has ...

James Dickey is passing into the oblivion of the unread. Anthologists seem to treat him as, at best, a 'major minor poet.' So it may...

I reside in the bullseye of the target audience for David Malouf's An Imaginary Life , a historical fantasy about Ovid in Black Sea exil...

Over the past year I've been dipping into Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's massive anthology, The Weird , and finding many wonderful things...

Clearly, The Neon Bible has its flaws. The prose lacks polish; the eponymous religious advertising sign fails to become a novelistic motif ...

Yes, it's delightfully perverse to think of the outrageously transgressive fictionist Dennis Cooper as any kind of puritan, but my idea ...

While listening to Beethoven's seventh symphony on NPR, I wondered about the feasibility of a symphonic formal paradigm in novelistic fi...

As quoted in Papa Hemingway by his nerdy, worshipful Eckermann, A. E. Hotchner, Ernest Hemingway considered John Horne Burns' The Galle...

One small way each of us can help slam the brakes on Trumpite fascism's high-speed degradation of American political discourse is to cea...

In this 2010 photo, the late neurologist Oliver Sacks holds the brain of Donald Trump. The organ was donated by the Trump Organization for...

As we embark on week two of this bizarre, pseudo-North Korean political experiment, with our maximally moronic Maximum Leader (call him Kim...

In a footnote at the back of his Oxford World's Classics edition of Walter Pater's The Renaissance (one of my personal holy books),...

Breaking news from the hippest part of the afterlife: saxophonist Lester Young has just requested a new nickname. I told myself I wa...

I don't think William H. Gass has ever written about the day in 1969 when painter Philip Guston used his body as a canvas, painting a wi...

The current Atlantic features a very good, must-read  cover story by Ta-Nehisi Coates on Obama, race and the rise of Trumpism . It offers a...

However, there were other aspects to Trump's engagement with the Russian authorities. One which had borne fruit for them was to exploit ...