A Commonplace Blog

Nicole Krauss, Great House (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). 289 pp. $24.95. Last December, when I surveyed the year’s best Jewish books for...

I am not happy that my prediction about Borders seems to be coming true . No one who lives by books is happy to see any bookstore close its...

Yesterday Jewcy unveiled the “50 Most Essential Works Of Jewish Fiction Of The Last 100 Years.” Jason Diamond, who compiled the miscellany,...

Now that even Obama ♥ Ronald Reagan, according to today’s Time magazine cover , it may be safe to celebrate the centennial of the fortieth...

NOTE : Jonathan Rosen, the novelist and editor of Nextbook, passes along the following letter, which he received the other day. “I had it ty...

My review of Burnt Books , a dual biography of Kafka and the Breslover rebbe by the Jubu hipster Rodger Kamenetz, is out in the February C...

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...