MINDFUL PLEASURES

For my 600th post here at Mindful Pleasures (and likely my last for a while), a collection of random ruminations, pithy parentheticals, crab...

I'm inclined to agree with Picasso biographer John Richardson's view of Gertrude Stein as Modernism's preeminent example of arti...

Here's the question (or one of them, at least) begged by the central thesis of Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel...

Perhaps the worst mistake in human history was made by those unknown people, lost in the dark backward of pre-literate time, who first decid...

While not Major Pynchon (that Bugs Bunny-playing-R. Lee Ermey military officer quired up from the pages of V. , The Crying of Lot 49 , Gravi...

Nabokov's The Enchanter , while impressively written and translated, is surely the most minor and conventional Nabokov book I've eve...

For me, Dostoyevsky is Notes from Underground and  Crime and Punishment , two of the most impressive works of fiction I've ever read, ...

Here's a video of a lecture in which Salman Rushdie introduces a classroom of apparently catatonic students to ten of his favorite books...

Jungian dream interpretation, as evidenced by the doctor's long essay on dream symbolism and alchemy ("Individual Dream Symbolism i...

George Steiner, proud diasporist, once lamented (in an interview conducted, unfortunately, by a woman who seemed intent on pressing into St...

As far as I know, Harold Bloom's sole public statement on the death of his friend Philip Roth is this paragraph posted on the Library of...

Here's a quote from Philip Roth that I don't recall reading in the last month's crop of obituaries and memorial essays: "...

Harpist . Marble. Late 2000s BCE. Height: 8.5 in. From the island of Amorgos in the Cyclades. National Archaeological Museum, Athens. ...

Summer is coming (even to Westeros, eventually), so it's time for some non-light but highly enlightening summer reading. This year I...

...yes and I'm streaming straight from my cuntsciousness Mollyblooming on this bluetiful boomsday ( shifting out of mockwakish into my n...

Add one more title to the list of undeservedly obscure American novels. Robert Roth's Sand in the Wind , the first major American litera...

Can something be made of the fact that John Updike's most explicitly religious, even theological, novel, 1975's A Month of Sundays ,...

My Collins paperback Italian-English dictionary informs me that while the word autore is, unsurprisingly, Italian for 'author,' the ...

I find it perversely pleasing and queerly appropriate that Ernest Hemingway's signature alcoholic beverage is a daiquiri, which I've...

Philip Roth wrote one back in the seventies, a big baseball novel for the decade of Quaaludes and 'caine. He even called it The Great Am...

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...