A Commonplace Blog

I’ll say this for the Kindle. It is forcing me to rethink my deepest convictions about literary form. Over at the New Republic , Rochelle Gu...

In the June issue of The American , the economists Richard Swedberg and Thorbjørn Knudsen develop and extend the theories of Joseph A. Schu...

Sports build character, Joseph C. Phillips writes in a column ahead of Father’s Day, but character is not built merely by picking up a ball...

I first learned the old saying from Peter Taylor’s 1964 story “The Throughway,” originally published in the Sewanee Review and then collect...

Dorothy Rabinowitz advances an interesting (if highly contentious) proposition in this morning’s Wall Street Journal . Namely: the growing ...

David Markson, who is ritually identified as a “postmodern novelist,” died in his Greenwich Village apartment last Friday. He was eighty-tw...

To a critic, it always comes as a shock to encounter novelists who are pleased with themselves for joining in a chant. The shock comes not b...

This morning’s featured article at Jewish Ideas Daily is on Chaim Grade, the great Yiddish novelist whose centennial is celebrated this ye...

My generally positive review of Sam Munson’s first novel appears in the June issue of Commentary . The November Criminals is a tale told b...

All you need to know about the so-called “flotilla fiasco” is here . Those who prefer words to pictures could do worse than to start with Mo...

The first Memorial Day—then called Decoration Day—was held on May 31, 1869, to dedicate the new Cypress Hills National Cemetery in Brooklyn...

Barbara Cantalupo, ed., Emma Wolf’s Short Stories in the Smart Set (Brooklyn: AMS Press, 2010). 247 pp. $87.50. The mother of American Jewi...

After praising the scene in Susan Messer’s novel Grand River and Joy in which the main character finds “release” during an accidental visi...

Susan Messer, Grand River and Joy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). 230 pp. $24.00. Once upon a time, Detroit was a great Je...

The pilgrimage festival of Shavuot , the original basis of the Christian holiday known as Pentecost , begins this evening. A Commonplace Blo...

It is not true that I “blame” the graduate writers’ workshops for the decline of region and place in American fiction, as one commentator c...

My life-and-works essay on the novelist Francine Prose has been brought out from behind Commentary ’s pay wall, since it leads the list of ...