A Commonplace Blog

As the year coughs to a stop, I find myself thinking more and more about the disappearance of a literary culture in America where books are ...

My old friend, mentor, and collaborator Denis Dutton has died in Christchurch, New Zealand, of prostate cancer. He was sixty-six. Dutton,...

The universal reaction to book lists is annoyance over what has been left out. Everyone remembers the uproar at this time last year when Pub...

’Tis the season, as Christopher Benson says, for best-book lists. At First Things , Benson compiles his own list, which has a distinctly Ch...

In a comment to an earlier post, Shelley Shaver warns that today the Federal Communications Commission will begin the long process of regul...

After registering my dissent on Kurt Vonnegut’s canonization by the Library of America, I guess that I have to come up with a better noveli...

The Library of America has made the weird and unpardonable decision to release an omnibus volume of fiction by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The volume...

This month the University of Chicago Press is republishing, in ebook format, a landmark of twentieth-century English fiction—Anthony Powell’...

Among my pet peeves is the common American greeting, “Happy holidays!” The intent is to offend no one—which, at this season of the year, mea...

“Let Franzen Ring,” my sour review of Freedom , appears in the December issue of Commentary . In it, I try to assign Franzen a place in the...

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...