A Commonplace Blog

“That is what I care about: making defensible statements.” Frederick Crews, “Partisans: Reply to Peter Wirth,” NYRB 26 (February 8, 1979).

William Wharton, author of the National Book Award-winning novel Birdy (1979), has died at the age of eighty-two. He raised and sold canar...

Jorie Graham, ed., The Best American Poetry 1990 (New York: Collier Books, 1990). 283 pp. $9.95. Mark Strand, ed., The Best American Poetry...

Daniel Green has a long post over at the Reading Experience, taking issue with the now-famous comments by Horace Engdahl, permanent secret...

“Our old culture in which humanity transmitted its common life from one generation to the next was a moral culture, and the ethical was supr...

I hate the term. “Literary fiction” is therapeutic. It is what is good for you, what you should read. As currently used—that is, to distingu...

“Now, in all we say about literature, and (above all) in all that we say about criticism, we instinctively take the autonomous individual fo...

Joe Eszterhas’s Crossbearer (St. Martin’s Press, $24.95) arrived in the mail yesterday. I haven’t had the time to read much of it, but so f...

John Updike’s smug recommendation that Sarah Palin ought to read his Month of Sundays , because she “is religious and so am I,” raises the q...

The detective novelist Tony Hillerman , who launched his literary career at the age of forty-five with The Blessing Way , has died at eight...

Asked by the Guardian what reading he would recommend to the presidential and vice-presidential candidates, John Updike recommends four no...

An enormously fruitful suggestion from Hilary Putnam ’s recent Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life (Indiana UP, 2008). Discussing I And Th...

In a post entitled “ Arts and Inspiration in the Collapse ” over at The Millions, C. Max Magee argues that nearly every serious novel writt...

Richard Ford, Independence Day (New York: Vintage, 1995). 451 pp. Paperback. $14.95. By coincidence, two different friends—both physicians,...

Michael Connelly, The Brass Verdict (New York: Little, Brown, 2008). 422 pp. $26.99. Connelly’s second legal thriller opens with the liar...

Philip Roth, Indignation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008). 231 pp. $26.00. Indignation is a new venture for the only living novelist repres...