John Wilson

We suffer nowadays from a surfeit of literary anni­versaries. One blurs into the next until we begin to long for a moratorium. And yet even so, a few such occasions are welcome. The 150th anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland yielded a splendid array of exhibitions, lectures, and books, . . . . Continue Reading »

The books of 2014, like the books of any year, utterly exceed our grasp. In one aspect, they suggest (they mimic, we could say) the divinely gratuitous excess of Creation; seen from another angle, their multiplicity reflects our fallenness, our propensity to error, our confusion. We need to hold . . . . Continue Reading »

In the month since Ray Bradbury died at the age of 91, a host of tributes have appeared, touching on almost every salient aspect of his long life and his exceptionally many-sided work. Yet one theme worthy of attention, so it seems to me, has been largely ignored. “Largely,” I say”not entirely… . Continue Reading »

Ah, the books of 2008: Who can number them? All About the Beat and The Art of the Public Grovel; American Earth and American Pests; The Lost Spy and The Terminal Spy. This was the year of Original Sin and The Forever War and a great wall of books about China. Fiction? Palace Council and Moscow . . . . Continue Reading »

The Right Attitude to Rain by alexander mccall smith pantheon, 288 pages, $21.95 Hard to believe that, only a handful of years ago, the name Alexander McCall Smith would have drawn a blank among American readers. An African-born academic in Scotland who specializes in medical law and frequently . . . . Continue Reading »

There’s an ancient human dream to be tiny: to make a hammock from a leaf and sup on nectar, to soar on a falcon’s back. This longing turns up in the folklore of fairies and the wee people, and its guises are sometimes charming, sometimes malign. Patrick Leigh Fermor tells of Voodoo adepts . . . . Continue Reading »

The era of the book is coming to a close. No one knows the day or hour, but inventor Ray Kurzweil says it will be soon. The fate of the book is merely a detail in the sweeping vision of Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking), but it is exemplary: Just as . . . . Continue Reading »

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