A Commonplace Blog

Early this morning, Patrick Kurp meditated on style, quoting several writers on the theme. My favorite is from Liebling: “The way you write...

My review of Charles McCarry’s Shelley’s Heart , which I characterize as one of the best novels ever written about the American Left, is in ...

Passion leaves you no will to act, because it leaves you no strength to resist. Elaboration murders wit (it explains the joke). Television s...

Art Durkee deserves credit for rising to my challenge to show just how my five definitive propositions about literature are conservative o...

The California novelist James D. Houston died last Thursday from cancer at the age of seventy-five. Houston taught at Santa Cruz while I wa...

In his comment to Frank Wilson’s kind link to my post on argument and monologue, Art Durkee says that my definitions of literature reflect ...

On Sunday, Stephen Romei asked , “What are the best final sentences in literature?” He himself nominated the last sentences of Der Prozess ,...

A sadly neglected portion of graduate training—in any field, not just English—is what might be called the ethics of argument. Young scholars...

Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge , a novel in stories about life in small-town Maine, has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In its...

Although I have small interest in popular culture, and even less in reality TV, like pretty much everyone else in the English-speaking world...

I should be nonplussed, I suppose, to have been cast as Garth Knight in Elberry’s remake of Robin of Sherwood . But it is refreshing to lea...

In the name of God, what are two books by Jonathan Culler doing alongside Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham, F. R. Leavis, and J. M. Coetzee...

The shortlist for the 2009 Miles Franklin Award was released yesterday. One of the nominees is a personal favorite. Tim Winton is compared ...

The American Book Exchange has compiled a list of the Top 10 Forgotten Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novels (h/t: Books, Inq. ). First on the list...

So Larry Kramer, who has also collected eighteen thousand signatures on a petition calling for a boycott, does not think —not for one second...

Hate to post and run, but last two days of Passover start in half an hour. Comments here are moderated, because in the past I have received ...

. . . what either occurrence of the word literary refers to in the following sentence : “Th[e] ability to enlist various kinds of writing n...