For reasons I haven’t been able to figure out, friendship—deep, genuine friendship—gets short shrift in contemporary fiction. The Chet & Bernie books are wonderful exceptions, and I am immensely grateful for them. Continue Reading »
The resurgent nationalisms of recent decades have been one response to the homogenizing impulses of globalization—but nation is not the solution to homelessness in Eugene Vodolazkin’s Brisbane. Continue Reading »
Twenty years after publishing his first novel—years he spent establishing himself, in incisive, often fearsome essays and reviews and nonfiction books, as a leading literary–cultural critic—Pankaj Mishra had a Damascene moment of sorts. He describes it in a recent essay for . . . . Continue Reading »
Style is the intellect in flight: A thought can only really travel when it has the equilibrium, speed, and structure to get off the ground. Continue Reading »
Even after Orwell explicitly diverged from some of Chesterton’s views in the 1930s, under the influence of socialist ideas and hopes, Chesterton’s assumptions and political and ethical conceptions continued to shape him. Continue Reading »
The late Australian poet Les Murray shared with Aquinas, another fat genius, a devotion to the Unmoved Mover and dedicated each of his thirty books to the greater glory of God. He was not a voice crying out in the wilderness. He was a poet sweating out in the bush. Continue Reading »
Algis Valiunas joins the podcast to discuss the brilliant and short life of Giacomo Leopardi, a poet still widely ignored in English-speaking circles. Continue Reading »
A spirited debate has been going on for nearly a decade now, much of it in these pages, about the apparent dearth of religious ideas in recent American fiction. Because many of the interlocutors—among the most prominent are Paul Elie, Randy Boyagoda, Dana Gioia, and Gregory . . . . Continue Reading »
Plutarch tells us that Gaius Gracchus (154–121 b.c.) devoted his life to civic reform, while Cato the Younger (95–46 b.c.) would “rather compete in valor with the best, than in wealth with the richest or the most covetous in love of money.” Impressive in both cases, no doubt, but what are . . . . Continue Reading »
For many of today’s students, the ideas of Adorno, Foucault, Barthes, and the rest are practically indigestible; the long hours required to understand these thinkers are drudgery. But for a brief period in the twentieth century, the act of reading them was downright religious, the air in the . . . . Continue Reading »
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