Thank you! 'The Palm House' is the only book of hers I've read, so I just had to take it as is, but I've really liked reading the reviews that contextualize it within all the other books. Another of those writers who gives rise to interesting criticism.
My Fiction Chronicle is on novels by Jay McInerney, Gwendoline Riley and Therese Bohman. Gift link: www.wsj.com/arts-culture...
My Fiction Chronicle is on novels by Jay McInerney, Gwendoline Riley and Therese Bohman. Gift link: www.wsj.com/arts-culture...
It's the Spring Books double issue this weekend in the WSJ! Pieces on Lewis & Clark, Twin Peaks, John Foster Dulles, Rasputin, Mary Kay, The Rolling Stones, pinball, Jayne Anne Phillips, Robert Coover, passport photos, forests, Georges Simenon, Kate DiCamillo & more! www.wsj.com/arts-culture...
From behind the paywall, my recent piece on Leslie Fiedler, "Love and Death in the American Novel," and the current state of criticism.
chronicleofhighereducation.substack.com/p/was-leslie...
"But to reach the heights of literature, to match the total risk that is love, you can’t go in for irony." A provocative contention from Randy Boyagoda in his piece on Kiran Desai's latest novel for Portico Quarterly. porticoquarterly.com/essay/an-ang...
"Looking back at [Jude the Obscure] was like peering down a well, down to my own foundations." This is Jhumpa Lahiri on her fixation with Thomas Hardy for the Yale Review. 'Nuff said, I should think. yalereview.org/article/jhum...
You're welcome! He writes pretty regularly for Open Letters Review these days: openlettersreview.com?author=5c47c...
This is like three issues behind, but I loved Joshua Hunt's Harper's dispatch on sumo wrestling--its pageantry, its politics and the popularity of Aonishiki Arata, "a blue-eyed twenty-one-year-old rikishi from Ukraine" harpers.org/archive/2026...
The great old blog tradition of exploring a personal encounter with a book lives on in Steve Donoghue's oddly stirring piece on re-reading James Agee's 'A Death in the Family' stevedonoghue.substack.com/p/a-death-in...
The bottomless riches of Iris Murdoch's books yield this good piece in The Point by Parker Henry, specifically about Murdoch's gift for "individualizing morality" thepointmag.com/criticism/mo...
"Annoying characters let us admit that we might be annoying too." I thought this, by Lily Meyer, was a clever Seinfeld-based reading of Andrew Martin's novel Covid-era abjection, "Down Time" www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/0...
The New Criterion put out a special poetry issue, with pieces on Heaney, Tennyson, Pushkin, etc and this really enlightening assessment, by Boris Dralyuk & Michael Caines, on Henri Coulette, "a poet of remarkable refinement and exquisite formal control" newcriterion.com/article/oper...
Ha, no pressure. I think he has a real comic sensibility that helps to let out some of the conceptual hot air. But it's definitely the case that some people just find it all twee and annoying.
I learned a ton from Robert Rubsam's heartfelt deep-dive into the Bruno Schulz film adaptations by the Brothers Quay, masters of stop-motion puppetry libertiesjournal.com/articles/the...
Gwendoline Riley, who has a new novel out this week, directs her laser-like powers of observation to Beryl Bainbridge's prose ("paragraphs are cluttered with adverbs and bulging with insinuation") in a bracingly good TLS piece www.the-tls.com/literature-b...
I swear that Ben Lerner exists to show critics a good time. This is no complaint. Giles Harvey's New Yorker piece is terrific (www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...), but I also appreciated Tom LeClair's lively, less familiar perspective in Open Letters Review: openlettersreview.com/posts/transc...
I've been meaning to post links to some favorites of what, by any objective measure, has been a profusion of great art and literary criticism. All the pieces on Solvej Balle, for instance, who I like reading about more than reading--especially this one by Joanna Biggs: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Online now is the inaugural issue of Portico, a brand new quarterly literary journal. Here's editor Micah Mattix with an essay describing the magazine's outlook and mission: porticoquarterly.com/essay/litera...
Ah, thanks. I guess the Goncourt win priced them out of it.
Ah, is it official that Transit Books will be bringing this out? Yes, Baker/Transit did a great job with 'The Birthday Party'.
"Batra was moved through various holding cells for 24 hours without food or water... she remains there without access to the consistent medical care she needs following surgeries she had in December. Within days of being in the facility, she caught a respiratory illness"
Laurent Mauvignier's 'La maison vide' has won the US Goncourt Prize--a fun award where students read and judge from the four Goncourt finalists. This year they came to the same decision as the French jurors. Really looking forward to this book's translation. villa-albertine.org/va/press-rel...
Dear god. Very, very serious allegations of mass civil rights violations at the State of Florida's Everglades immigration detention center (officially known as "Alligator Alcatraz").
'“The war changed the regime—and not in a good way,” said Danny Citrinowicz, who formerly headed the Iran desk for Israeli military intelligence. “We created a reality that is worse than what Iranians were facing before the war.”' www.wsj.com/world/middle...
I'm excited that Ben Davies will get a lot of playing time
very true
Do you have some sort of trick for scoping these titles without being really obvious and weird to the people reading the books? I spend a lot of time on the subway frustratedly craning my neck but still trying to seem natural about it.
Sergei Lebedev has been awarded the Prix Montluc Résistance et Liberté for his writings aimed at ending impunity for Russian state crimes. It was presented at the former Lyon prison where Nazis incarcerated and tortured French resistance fighters and Jews.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJIz...
A striking trio of books for this weekend’s WSJ Fiction Chronicle, including an astounding work of Zola-esque naturalism by the Tamil writer Jeyamohan www.wsj.com/arts-culture...