A Commonplace Blog

My review of Cynthia Ozick’s new novel Foreign Bodies is on the front page of Jewish Ideas Daily this morning. In her latest book, Ozick ...

Saul Bellow, Letters , ed. Benjamin Taylor (New York: Viking, 2010). 571 pp. $35.00. Not many more collections of letters written by America...

Today is Veterans’ Day, a day of gratitude and remembrance that should not go unremarked. Last year I examined veterans’ novels; no need to...

In a comment to my reflections on cancer etiquette, Don asks what reading I found helpful in going through the experience of life-threateni...

In the December issue of Vanity Fair , Christopher Hitchens takes up the difficult and perplexing question of what to say to someone who ha...

In a comment that I deleted because of its vitriolic irrelevance, a reader suggests that my proposal to take away the university faculty’s ...

Over at A Memory Theater , Adlai Jurek admits to himself that there are books he will never read. Not because he has made the conscious dec...

A Commonplace Blog is two years old. On October 20, 2008, at 11:09 in the morning, I posted a review of Philip Roth’s Indignation to spank...

Miriam Burstein’s provocative reconsideration of Stanley Crawford’s brilliant 1978 novel Some Instructions to my Wife Concerning the Upkeep...

Over at the National Review ’s academic blog Phi Beta Cons , the political scientist Robert Weissberg offers a solution to the problem of t...

Philip Roth, Nemesis (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). 280 pp. $26.00. In the front matter to his latest novel, Philip Roth groups...

The five finalists for the National Book Award in fiction were announced earlier today. They are: Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in Ameri...

Daniel Athitakis was born yesterday , and is already glaring at his father skeptically. All fathers know that look. Congratulations, Mark, o...

“Lifting a rock only to drop it on one's own feet” is a Chinese folk saying to describe the behavior of certain fools. The reactionaries...

For 2010 is the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who was laureled “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant ...

As of this morning, Cormac McCarthy is the betting favorite to win the Nobel Prize in literature. [ Update: The final odds of his win, whic...

Reading in shul on Saturday instead of listening to the Torah, I came upon this passage in Gershom Scholem: There is also a life of traditi...