A Commonplace Blog

Once a year, it seems, a virus invades the family, knocking everyone out for a spell, one by one. This past week a particularly stubborn and...

The guardians of the liberal arts, like Mary Crane , have made the same mistake as the Jewish socialists and Yiddishists who emigrated to th...

Wilfrid Sheed died Wednesday of a bacterial infection in Great Barrington, Mass. He was eighty years old. In a nearly fifty-year career, Sh...

The best way to improve the standing of the liberal arts is to stop defending them. Or so says the director of the newly created Institute f...

In a comment to my post on dialogue in the novel, Fabio asks an excellent question: “What makes one character’s ‘voice’ fit, and the other’...

Edmund White brought down his decalogue of New York books in the Guardian yesterday. The list is particularly good, not merely because it ...

It’s not the same as recorded speech. A better word for the back-and-forth between persons in most novels would be chitchat. The word dialog...

Since I first commented on it, Professor Alan Gribben’s edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been condemned from all sides. I have...

Happy families are all alike, but every generation is prudish in its own way. Since about the mid-’eighties—the term was first used in the N...

Alan Gribben’s effort to make Adventures of Huckleberry Finn “acceptable” in the “new classroom” ought not to stop with Twain’s great nove...

A new sanitized edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be published in a $24.95 hardcover next month, and according to Publishers ...

If it is not merely special pleading, the hermeneutics of suspicion—or what Marilynne Robinson more accurately calls the hermeneutics of con...

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...