Helen Andrews

Aspiring writers are generally regarded as one of nature’s lower life forms, especially by established writers, most of whom seem to wonder whether the taxonomist who placed aspiring writers in phylum Chordata wasn’t perhaps claiming too much for them. From where they’re sitting, that’s an . . . . Continue Reading »

“‘An epileptic chicken,’ is how the accused described Smerdyakov.” Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, unless the family consists of a morally depraved patriarch and three highly differentiated siblings who, after years out of contact with each other, convene at the family home . . . . Continue Reading »

The idea of David Brooks teaching a class on the subject of humility at Yale strikes a lot of people as inherently funny, and making allowances for mean-spiritedness (and I dare say jealousy), the mockers do have a point. Humility, as a virtue, bears the same relation to op-ed columnizing as . . . . Continue Reading »

The head of the Nigerian Football Supporters’ Club, Rafiu Ladipo, has confessed that for years he has been using juju (traditional local magic) to try to bring the Super Eagles to victory. But no longer: “We came to realize that juju just doesn’t play football.” “There . . . . Continue Reading »

The same quality that makes Russian novels so distinctive in world literature can also transform even sensitive Anglophone readers into the boy at the back of English class who keeps asking why Hamlet doesn’t just make up his mind already. It comes down to a certain implausibility in the . . . . Continue Reading »

Arrogant Without wading too deep into any technical lit-crit battles over the so-called death of the author, I think I can safely endorse the rule that, in general, one should not criticize a writer’s work by attacking his personal life. If an author happens to have been an adulterer, a . . . . Continue Reading »

Most of the “rules for blogging” I have come across—like Alan Jacobs’s “ Rules for Deportment for Online Discourse ”—focus on very basic things like avoiding ad hominem attacks and not arguing in bad faith. These rules seem to me to boil down to a general . . . . Continue Reading »

I have no idea how Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov came to be regarded as definitive. Let me rephrase that. I know why. Fourteen thousand copies a year, practically indefinitely, is why. There’s a lot of money at stake, for them and for . . . . Continue Reading »

There is more fiction than non-fiction on this list, but that’s only because my non-fiction reading this year has been dominated by a succession of esoteric obsessions. I encountered some very good books that way, but the mini-reviews for all of them would have gone something like “A . . . . Continue Reading »

Noah Millman thinks he has located the essence of the conservative temperament in the works of Leo Tolstoy, which is hard to believe. Perhaps you know the old joke about the tenure committee’s verdict on Jesus Christ. (“A fine teacher but didn’t publish.”) Tolstoy’s . . . . Continue Reading »